Everyone at the Table: A Drink Finally Made for Satay, Laksa and Chilli Crab
Some of the world's great dishes arrive with their drink already decided. In Madrid, a plate of jamón comes with a small glass of beer before you've thought to ask. In Osaka, the highball is poured the moment the kushikatsu lands. In Mexico City, the taco stand keeps a row of agua fresca jars on the counter, hibiscus red and horchata white, catching the sun. Nobody consults a menu. The pairing was settled long ago by people who ate the food every day and knew exactly what it needed.
Singapore eats as well as anywhere on earth. In 2020, UNESCO added its hawker culture to the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which put a plate of chicken rice in the same conversation as flamenco and Neapolitan pizza-making. And yet ask what you should drink with laksa, and the answer is usually a shrug.
Walk to the end of any row of stalls and you'll find where that shrug comes from: the drinks stall. There's a fridge of canned chrysanthemum tea, a sugar cane press grinding away, lime juice in a plastic cup with the straw already in, and a tray of kopi peng sweating onto the counter. Everything is cold, sweet and fast, which is exactly what it was built to be. The drinks stall was designed to fix your thirst. It was never asked to complete the meal.
A Great Food Culture Without a Signature Drink
Hawker food grew up quickly. It began with pushcarts and roadside stalls, moved into purpose-built centres, and was perfected one specialist stall at a time. One uncle makes only satay, and one auntie has made only laksa for thirty years. The food became extraordinary, and the drinks were left to take care of themselves.
But a single hawker meal is a complicated thing. In one sitting it can move through smoke, sugar, coconut fat, chilli heat, fermented shrimp paste and a sharp squeeze of calamansi. Food like that needs a drink with structure: bitterness to cut the richness, bubbles to reset your palate, and fruit to do what the lime on the side of the plate has always done.
In other words, it needs hops. And no one does that better than Ren Min.
The Brewery Born at the Hawker Table
Ren Min is a Singapore craft brewery, and its zero-proof range reads like it was designed by someone who has spent a lot of evenings at a plastic table under a ceiling fan.
Ren Min's story starts with a joke. At university, friends turned Manbeer Singh's first name into a Mandarin pun, rén píjiǔ, which translates literally as "man beer." He became a litigation lawyer anyway. Then, in 2016, he opened a craft beer stall inside Maxwell Food Centre, among the woks and the queues, betting that great beer belonged where Singapore actually eats. A second stall followed at Old Airport Road, and eventually a brewery of his own. The name, Ren Min, means "the people." It was his girlfriend's suggestion, and it's a quiet tribute to the hawkers who keep these centres running through the heat. Look closely at the logo and you'll find a red plastic hawker chair, the kind every Singaporean has sat on a thousand times.
The first can is Ren Ren IPA (under 0.5% ABV). Rén rén (人人) means "everyone," and it's hard to think of a better name for anything poured at a hawker centre. At seven in the evening, a construction crew, a table of office workers and three generations of one family end up sharing the same row of stools, and nobody thinks it strange. The beer is full-flavoured, with tropical citrus up front, juicy hops in the middle and a dry, pine-sharp finish. It's bold enough to stand next to anything on the table.
The second is The Worst Hop Soda (0.0% ABV, 0 kcal per 100ml). Ren Min calls it the worst at being beer, and the joke is the point: it isn't trying to be one. It's sparkling water dry-hopped with Galaxy hops, so it smells of passionfruit and ripe pineapple, with fine, sharp bubbles made for afternoons when the air feels like soup.
One can is bold and one is bright. Between them, they cover the menu.
Satay: What to Drink When the Grill Is Doing the Talking
Pour Ren Ren IPA. Hop bitterness cuts through sweet peanut sauce, and the pine notes pick up the char from the grill.
Every evening, the stretch of Boon Tat Street beside Lau Pa Sat closes to traffic, and the satay grills are wheeled out onto the road. Within half an hour the street is hazy with smoke. The stall men fan the coals with woven fans in a rhythm they've repeated thousands of times, calling out orders over the hiss of fat hitting charcoal. The skewers come off glossy and blackened at the edges, and they go straight into a bowl of peanut sauce thick enough to stand a stick in.
That's a great deal of sweetness and fat, and Ren Ren IPA was made to cut through it. The bitterness clears the peanut richness from your palate, the citrus does the job the cucumber and raw onion usually do, and that resinous, piney finish meets the smoke from the grill.
It's a pairing that rewards greed. The more sauce you use, the better it gets, so you now have an excellent reason to ask for extra.
Laksa: What to Drink When the Bowl Fights Back
Pour The Worst Hop Soda. It's 0.0%, low in bitterness and full of bubbles, so it cools coconut and chilli heat instead of adding to it.
In Katong, laksa is served with the noodles cut short, so the whole bowl can be eaten with a spoon. No chopsticks, no twirling. It's a small decision that tells you everything about what matters in the dish, which is the broth. It's orange-red and glossy with coconut milk and rempah, it hides cockles and dried shrimp beneath the surface, and it comes crowned with a spoonful of sambal that quietly builds heat until, somewhere near the bottom of the bowl, your forehead gets involved.
This is no place for a big bitter beer, because bitterness tends to make chilli taste hotter. What laksa needs is lift, which is what The Worst Hop Soda does best. The bubbles cut through the coconut cream, the passionfruit and pineapple sit easily beside the laksa leaf, and with no alcohol in the glass, nothing turns the heat up further.
Drink it as cold as the fridge allows. On a weekday lunch in 33°C heat, it will be the most refreshing thing on the table.
Chilli Crab: What to Drink with the Occasion Dish
Pour Ren Ren IPA. Chilli crab is sweeter than it is fiery, and the IPA's bitterness balances that sweetness while its citrus brightens the tomato-chilli gravy.
The story usually goes back to the 1950s, when Cher Yam Tian started stir-frying crab with tomato sauce and chilli at home. Her husband then sold the dish from a pushcart by the sea. Seventy-odd years later, it has become the dish Singapore orders when something is worth celebrating: a birthday, a promotion, relatives in from overseas, or a friend who has never had it and needs to be shown.
Anyone who has eaten it knows the crab is almost the excuse. The real prize is the gravy. It's sweet, tangy and gently spicy, with ribbons of egg running through it, and it gets mopped up with fried mantou long after the last claw has been cracked. Ren Ren IPA has the body to hold its own here. Its bitterness keeps the sweetness from becoming cloying, and its bubbles carry you through a long, messy, shell-cracking meal without the richness weighing you down.
If your crab place is generous with the chilli, or half your table doesn't like bitterness, pour The Worst Hop Soda instead. It's lighter and fruitier, and just as good for the mantou round.
Does Bitter Beer Make Spicy Food Hotter?
It can. Both alcohol and strong hop bitterness tend to intensify the burn of capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli hot. So the simplest rule for pairing drinks with hawker food is to match bitterness to sweetness, and fizz to fire. Sweet, smoky and rich dishes like satay, char kway teow and chilli crab can take a bold IPA. Genuinely spicy dishes like laksa, or anything swimming in sambal, are happier with something fruity, fizzy and alcohol-free.
When the Hawker Centre Comes to You
Not every great hawker night happens at a hawker centre. Some of the best ones are a tapao run, a coffee table covered in brown paper packets and rubber bands, and a group chat that simply says "come over."
That's when it pays to have the fridge ready: Ren Ren IPA for the satay crowd and The Worst Hop Soda for the spice lovers. Everyone gets something cold, and everyone gets something that actually goes with dinner.
- Free delivery on orders above $69
- Express & Eco Delivery: same-day for orders placed before 1pm, Mon–Fri, in 100% plastic-free packaging
- BCRS: each can carries a $0.10 refundable deposit, returned at any BCRS reverse vending machine
By the end of a good hawker night, the table tells the story. There's a small pile of bare satay sticks, a laksa bowl scraped clean with its spoon resting inside, and a scatter of crab shell on every napkin. Among it all stands a row of empty cans with a name printed on them that means everyone. That's all a hawker table has ever really been about.