Camas graduates brew up success in Taiwan

Tim Smith and Devin Nail have known each other since the late 1990s when they became tomodachi (friends) in a Camas High School Japanese class. As adults, they both got into the Portland beer scene and started homebrewing in 2004. They eventually reunited in Taiwan. Nail moved to the Asian island in 2008, followed by Smith in 2010. There, they began brewing once again, motivated by their new country’s relative lack of quality craft brews.

The Camas natives made a lot of beer — one several-gallon batch every week — by purchasing previously impossible-to-find ingredients from a newly opened online homebrew store and emulating the recipes of some of their favorite beers from back home, such as Deschutes Brewery’s Black Butte Porter. They made so much that they didn’t have to buy beer anymore; they had plenty of their own to drink. There was just one small problem.

“Our friends kept coming over and drinking all of our beer,” Nail said.

Eventually, they decided that if their beer was so popular, they may as well profit from it. Their Yilan City, Taiwan-based brewery, Black Drongo Brewery, has become one of the island nation’s fastest-rising beer producers since launching in 2019 and opening to the public in March 2020.

“It’s been life-changing,” said Smith, a 2000 Camas High School graduate. “It’s become a lifestyle for me. We’ve made so many friends, almost a little community. I come to work every day happy. I never feel like, ‘Oh, I have to go to work.’ I love watching customers enjoy their beer and knowing that I was a part of that.”

The brewery has built a community around its brand and taproom, which is managed by Smith’s wife, brewery co-founder Bella Wang, according to Nail.

“It’s a unique mix of the foreign expat immigrant group and locals,” said Nail, a 2001 Camas High graduate. “It’s a really interesting place where people get together and share different experiences, people who maybe would never know each other otherwise.”

Beer in Taiwan was dominated by monopoly products until 2002, when free trade became law. The liberalization of the Taiwanese beer market was followed by the emergence of craft breweries, of which there are now about 70, according to a 2020 U.S. Department of Agriculture report.

The duo viewed the fact that there were relatively few craft breweries in Taiwan at the time of Black Drongo’s opening as an opportunity, not a drawback.

“We didn’t have the guaranteed market of drinkers that you’d have back in the Pacific Northwest,” said Nail, who also works as a corporate training consultant. “But with that, we also didn’t have such fierce competition, either.”

“We were both really enthusiastic and optimistic about it,” Smith added. “We started small enough that it wasn’t so intimidating.”

While there are fewer craft beer drinkers in Taiwan than other countries, the locals are “really into it,” Smith said.

“The Taiwanese are very enthusiastic about their hobbies,” said Smith, who worked as an English teacher in Taiwan before launching the brewery. “If they decided to start cycling, they’d go out and buy the best gear on day one. They drink craft beer the same way. They crack their first can of IPA or something, and then after that they’re going to learn about every beer, and then they’re going to travel the world and go to Oktoberfest in Germany.”

Like Nail, Smith studied Japanese at Portland State University and lived in Japan for one year before moving to Taiwan.

Black Drongo’s offerings include pale ales, India pale ales, amber ales and stouts, the types of beers that can be found on the menu of any brewery taproom in the Pacific Northwest.

“We want to share the beers that we grew up drinking,” Smith said. “We want to give the Taiwanese consumer the authentic experience without actually going to the United States.”

The brewery has already undergone two expansions and is set to grow once more with the addition of new equipment that will bring it up to “seven or eight barrels” in an effort to make enough brew for not only its own taproom, but bars all around Taiwan, according to Nail.

Yilan City, located in northeast Taiwan, is a 45- to 60-minute drive from Taipei.

“The sky’s the limit,” Smith said. “I like the size that we’re at now, but more tanks would be good. Maybe one day we could build a brewery from the ground up. Our goal is to become one of the attractions you hit up when you visit this town. When you visit Yilan, you go to Black Drongo.”