Why RedDot as a name?

 

 

The brand name RedDot traces my first encounter with beer brewing in South Africa. I was on a family holiday at Kruger National Park in the year 1997, enjoying the open Safari, where the wild animals roamed freely while visitors like us sat protected in our vehicles or the stockade for safety reasons.

 

One afternoon, I passed two South African soldiers chatting away outside a broken down military truck a short distance from the stockade. To me, it would really be the highlight of my  South African holiday  if I could sit just  in the open safari with lions, impalas and elephants roaming in the background. Driven by this curiosity, I  drove out of the stockade to seek out these two soldiers. I wanted to join them to sit in the wilderness and to enjoy the thrill of being outside the safety of the stockade .

 

The soldiers were also happy to meet a visitor from Singapore. They offered me an unlabelled bottle of beer. Nothing beat having a cool beer to fight the sweltering heat in the middle of nowhere. I asked them for the brand and they said it was home-brewed. That was the first time I heard of home-brew. The South African soldiers assured me that it was easy to brew and directed me to buy the ingredients from a homebrew shop in Johannesburg.

 

At one of the homebrew shops, I was asked whether I wanted to brew a Lager or an Ale. At that time, not knowing enough about beers , I was puzzled. The ingredients were packed and marked with either 1 red dot or with no marking at all to differentiate the products. I chose the packet with one Red Dot. That began my journey into brewing. As such, when I decided to set up a microbrewery, RedDot becomes a natural choice of a name.

 

Subsequent years saw me spending much time researching and poring over beer books, building brewing equipment on my own, experimenting and creating different types of beer. Finally, I decided to validate my knowledge in brewing in the States. The course gave me the confidence that I was in the right direction.

 

RedDot BrewHouse at Dempsey is a passion that took almost a decade to materialize. Housing a brewery in a historical building, rich in military history and  nestled in lush tranquil setting was just irresistible. An old dilapidated barrack was restored to what you see today with some of the original bricks that were 100 odd years old. Two and a half years later, we found another beautiful historical building at Boat Quay, south bank of the Singapore River mouth , a river that was the source of entrepot trade and life in early Singapore. The second RedDot BrewHouse now offers our signature beers from a row of old Chinese shop houses , rich in commercial history of our early Chinese settlers.

 

Beers, an age old historical beverage, to be enjoyed in age old historical buildings like Dempsey’s Tanglin Barracks (1860) and Boat Quay’s old commercial Chinese shop houses (1826).   RedDot  Beers,  housed in rich  history,  rich in taste.   Cheers!