A colonial name that outlived its company.

Larue — sold as Bière Larue, and in Vietnam usually as Bia Larue — is a lager brewed by Heineken Vietnam, which lists it among its brands alongside Heineken, Tiger and Bia Viet. It carries the name of Victor Larue, a Frenchman who brewed in colonial Vietnam.

Sources give different dates and places for the beer’s start. VnExpress, reporting in March 2010, said Bière Larue was first produced and named by Victor Larue, who set up an ice factory and brewery in 1909. Erik Villard, writing in Vietnam magazine in May 2022, said it was first brewed in Saigon in 1909. Tuổi Trẻ, reporting on a new Larue beer in August 2022, said the brand was born in Đà Nẵng in 1909.

Larue’s name is also claimed by another brewer. Sabeco, the Ho Chi Minh City group behind Bia Saigon and 333, opens its own history with a small brewery that it says Victor Larue set up in Saigon in 1875; it dates the legal basis of its brewery at Chợ Lớn to a decree of March 1909 and says the plant was merged into the French group BGI in September 1927. French Wikipedia gives a third date, 1894, for the founding of the Cholon brewery by Larue and Hommel. The writer Loïc Muller, in a history of Vietnamese beer published by Ẩm Thực Hiện Đại in December 2024, says it was the Larue brothers’ company, and that the Denis brothers founded Brasseries et Glacières de l’Indochine in 1927, which absorbed the operations of both the Hommel and Larue families.

The tiger on the label.

The beer’s best-known feature is an animal. Villard wrote in 2022 that it was officially named Bière Larue but was “more commonly called Tiger Beer after the image on the label,” and that it was one of the two staple lagers of southern Vietnam during the war, alongside the beer that became 333. He added that both are still lagers but that their recipes have changed since the war, to suit more international tastes. VnExpress, in 2010, also described Bière Larue as having a tiger logo.

The nickname now sits awkwardly beside another brand. Villard noted that Bière Larue should not be confused with the Singapore beer Tiger, which is sold by the same company; Heineken Vietnam says it first brewed Tiger in Vietnam in 1993.

The brand has kept its name through several owners after the colonial period. Heineken Vietnam says its Da Nang brewery began as a joint venture between BGI — by then the Société des Brasseries et Glacières Internationales — and the Da Nang Beer & Beverage Company, set up in January 1994, and that the brewery first brewed Larue in 1995. It says the business became wholly foreign-owned as Foster’s Da Nang in 1997, and that the brewery, in the Hòa Khánh industrial zone, has also brewed Tiger since 2011. The trade journal Brauwelt International reported in 2006 that the Vietnamese breweries had first belonged to the Frenchman Pierre Castel, whose business struggled in the early 1990s, before the Australian brewer Foster’s took them over.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all lagers and beers from South and Southeast Asia: Angkor from Cambodia, 333, Huda and Larue from Vietnam, Bira 91 from India, Lion Lager from Sri Lanka and Myanmar Beer from Myanmar. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that grew up inside a single national brewery to labels that now belong to much larger international brewing groups, and a single brand can be poured everywhere from a street-side stall to a hotel bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a name, a label, a can and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, taken on foreign partners or moved its brewing far beyond the city where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its shareholders over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Foster’s to Heineken.

Foster’s sold out in 2006. Brauwelt International reported in September 2006 that it would sell its breweries at Da Nang, in central Vietnam, and in Tiền Giang, in the Mekong Delta, together with their local brands, to Asia Pacific Breweries of Singapore; Heineken Vietnam dates its acquisition of Foster’s Da Nang to 2007. Heineken Vietnam describes itself as a joint venture between Heineken and SATRA, the Saigon Trading Group, which opened its first brewery in Ho Chi Minh City in 1991. In November 2012 Heineken said it had completed the purchase of Fraser and Neave’s interests in Asia Pacific Breweries and held 95.3 per cent of it; in 2019, the company says, its northern and southern businesses were combined into one Heineken Vietnam. English Wikipedia, citing Vietnamese business press from 2012, describes the company under its earlier name, Vietnam Brewery Limited, as a joint venture of Asia Pacific Breweries and the Saigon Trading Group that brewed and sold Heineken, Tiger and Bière Larue, and as one of Sabeco’s main rivals.

Larue has also been sold outside central Vietnam. In March 2010 VnExpress reported that the Heineken-supervised brewer APB Hanoi was launching Bière Larue in the capital, at an event at Hanoi’s Quần Ngựa stadium. Its newest beer was aimed back at the centre. In August 2022, Tuổi Trẻ reported, Heineken Vietnam launched Larue Smooth, developed for the central market and brewed at its brewery in Quảng Nam province, in what the paper called a youthful, more eye-catching pack with a new tall can; the chairman of Quảng Nam’s provincial people’s committee called Larue a source of pride for local drinkers.

For a design guide, Larue shows how a founder’s name and a single animal can keep a beer recognisable through French, Australian and Heineken ownership. Compare 333, the other wartime lager of southern Vietnam, and Bia Saigon, whose owner also traces its history to Victor Larue. For this guide we use an amber, umber and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Larue’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.