FOOD PAIRING
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Sunbird Brewing Company takes its name from the Crimson Sunbird, Singapore’s national bird. If you’ve never seen one, picture something tiny and fast, with a flash of scarlet that’s gone almost before you notice it. It’s a fitting name for a home-grown brewery. Small, quick on its feet and very much from here.
We like a brewery that wears its roots openly. Plenty of names in beer chase something vaguely international, but Sunbird pointed straight at home from day one. As the team behind a craft beer bar in Singapore, we find that refreshing. It says something about who the beer is for and where it belongs.
Sunbird was founded by Clive Tan, who serves as both head brewer and director. He didn’t arrive at the brewhouse door as a newcomer. Before Sunbird, he worked at Archipelago Brewery and Brewerkz, two names that anyone who has followed the local beer scene will recognise.
That background matters. Time spent in established breweries teaches you the unglamorous side of the job: cleaning, consistency, and making the same beer taste the same way batch after batch. It also gives you a feel for what local drinkers actually order once the novelty wears off. So when Clive set out on his own, he came with experience and a clear sense of the audience he was brewing for.
Then came the timing. Sunbird launched in April 2020, right in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. For any new business, that would be rough. For a brewery, it was especially tough, because so much beer is sold in bars and restaurants, poured across a counter to people sitting on stools. Suddenly, on-premise sales were disrupted, and that route to drinkers was largely blocked.
Sunbird didn’t wait around. It quickly pivoted to a direct-to-consumer delivery platform, getting beer to people at home rather than relying on venues to do the selling. It’s hard to overstate how much nerve that takes. You’ve spent months getting ready to pour beer for a crowd, and instead you’re figuring out how to land it on someone’s doorstep.
It’s a little like planning a big dinner party and then cooking the whole menu for takeaway instead. The food still has to be good. It just has to travel well and find its way to people in a completely different way. That early flexibility tells you a lot about the brewery’s character.
Sunbird’s original lineup featured four beers, each with a name that leaned into the bird theme:
That’s a thoughtful spread of styles for a starting lineup. A pale ale is the friendly, everyday option, the kind of style that usually brings a bit of orange zest and bread crust with a tidy, dry finish. A white IPA is a hybrid, generally pairing the soft, hazy body of a wheat beer with a stronger hit of hops. A Scottish ale heads the other way, typically leaning on malt for toffee and toasted biscuit notes. And a Belgian witbier is classically pale and cloudy, with a gentle, spiced, citrusy lift. Four beers, four quite different moods.
The release that really caught our eye, though, was the Ondeh-Ondeh Porter. Sunbird brewed this seasonal beer to mark Singapore’s National Day, drawing inspiration from ondeh-ondeh, the much-loved little dessert balls filled with gula melaka and rolled in coconut. The beer brings together those flavours: the dark, molten sweetness of gula melaka, aromatic coconut and the grassy, vanilla-like perfume of pandan.
A porter makes a smart base for this. The style’s roasted malt already tends towards dark caramel and cocoa, so adding palm sugar and toasted coconut feels less like a gimmick and more like a natural conversation. Think of the moment you bite into an ondeh-ondeh and the syrup floods out, then picture that sweetness sitting on top of something roasty and dark. It’s a beer that tastes like home to a lot of Singaporeans, and that’s exactly the point.
Hard work in tough conditions eventually got noticed. Sunbird Brewing was later recognised at the Asia Beer Championship Awards (Brew Asia) as Asia’s Champion Small-Sized Brewery.
That’s a big title for a brewery that started life during a pandemic, pivoting to deliveries before it had a chance to settle in. It places Sunbird among the most respected small producers in the region, judged alongside breweries from across Asia. If you’d like to explore its current range and story in more detail, Sunbird Brewing’s own site is the best place to start. It’s also a name you’ll find among Craft Beer by Ki-setsu’s picks for the best craft beer in Singapore if you’re building your own local shortlist.
Sunbird’s story is a neat snapshot of the local scene as a whole. Singapore is a small market with high costs, a hot climate and plenty of imported beer competing for attention. Building a brewery here was never going to be easy, and launching one in 2020 took it to another level.
Yet Sunbird adapted, kept brewing and ended up earning regional recognition. It also proved that a Singaporean brewery can draw on local flavours, like gula melaka, coconut and pandan, and turn them into something drinkers genuinely look forward to each year. That mix of resilience and local pride is what makes the scene here worth paying attention to. The breweries that survive the hard years tend to come out sharper and more confident.
Next time you’re at Craft Beer by Ki-setsu at Fortune Centre, ask the team whether there’s anything local on tap. Browse Craft Beer by Ki-setsu’s rotating selection and, if a Singapore-brewed beer is pouring, order it alongside an imported pour in a similar style. Smell each one first, then taste them side by side. Notice whether the local beer reaches for flavours you recognise from home, and which one makes you want a second sip sooner.
