This Vietnamese cafe serves egg beer, and it's a hit

Gone are the days when serving an egg would be restricted to whipping out a handful for a slice of the fried yellow heaven. Every day, people are coming up with novel ways to cook the queen of versatility. This time, the master innovator turns out to be a decades-old cafe in Hanoi that has been serving drinkers a frothy beer cocktail.

The creamy, frothy egg drink is available in several variants, with the base drink being rum, matcha, chocolate, or even aerated cola drinks.

It is claimed to be so much in demand among locals and tourists alike that the owner’s daughter ends up cracking nearly 1,000 eggs daily.

Japan Times reports that the menu staple at the Giang Cafe is a concoction of ice-cold beer topped off with egg yolks whipped in sugar and a dollop of butter.

Nguyen Chi Hoa, the owner of the café, said he had first prepared the drink back in 1999, just to quench his curiosity to find out how it would taste.

Sitting in the busy café, he said: “I made egg beer just for myself.… I thought it was good, so I decided to give it a try to see if anyone agreed.”

Luckily for him, people probably caught on to the new kid on the block quick enough, possibly because it was not so different in taste from another item already existent on the menu -- Vietnamese coffee topped with sweetened egg froth.

Hoa said the recipe originally belonged to his father, who had come up with it in 1946. It was meant to serve as an affordable alternative to cappuccinos enjoyed by French colonial masters, who used cow milk.

“Poor people could also drink egg coffee because they had lots of chickens, so they just cracked an egg, added sugar and mixed it together — then we had egg coffee,” he added.

According to Hoa, the most of his customers are unaware of any cocktail called egg beer, but he wins them over easily, especially beer-loving tourists from Germany. He ends up selling at least 20 mugs per day.