Jim & Dad's Brewing Company

Jim & Dad's Brewing Company (in Chinese, Ji Mu Lao Die) was set up in 2013 by Jim Sung and his father after Jim, then an office worker who home-brewed at weekends, won Taiwan's national home-brew competition that year. They turned a gravel quarry in Yuanshan, Yilan, that had been disused for almost 20 years into a 3,000-ping site, built between May 2014 and May 2015, and the brewery opened in 2015 as Taiwan's first craft beer tourism factory, with a tasting room, tours and a five-storey lookout tower over the Lanyang Plain. The family brews American-style hoppy ales alongside beers made with Taiwanese produce, from local wheat to pomelo, kumquat, passion fruit, ginger and maqaw mountain pepper.

The beers

• Lanyang Knight, white ale with Taiwanese wheat, 4%
• Egret Black Tea Weizen, black tea wheat beer, 6.5%
• Passion Fruit IPA, fruit IPA, 7.5%
• Summer Mosaic, hoppy pale ale, 5.5%
• Hop Bomb, double IPA, 9.7%

The beers come in 330ml bottles and on draught, with seasonals, barrel-aged beers such as a bourbon barrel-aged imperial red, and co-branded releases.

Where to drink it

The brewery's tasting room in Yilan is at No. 411, Section 2, Yuanshan Road, Yuanshan, closed on Tuesdays. In Taipei, the brewery's own Jim & Dad's Taproom and Bottle Shop on Yanping North Road in Dadaocheng opened at the end of 2019. The beers also appear at BUDA in Gongguan, at Learn Bar and at Piao-Lounge in Tainan. All of these are listed below.