SLOWAVE Shifts from Fashion to Brewing, Bringing Millet Wine to Taiwan's Tables

SLOWAVE founder Hayden Chuang's career began not in food and beverage but in fashion design. He later studied fashion management in the UK and, upon returning to Taiwan, worked in fashion and marketing-related fields. This background seems unrelated to his current venture into brewing, yet it has shaped his sensitivity toward ingredients and naming. SLOWAVE first experimented with brewing beer using ingredients such as Taiwanese tea, collaborating with restaurants to launch products. This experimental phase paved the way for the later shift toward grain-based brewing.

The team experimented with grains such as sorghum before ultimately settling on millet as the core brewing ingredient. Hayden renamed the millet-brewed wine "Su Jiu" (millet wine), aiming to dilute the stereotypical impressions Taiwanese society holds toward "millet wine" in its conventional sense. This naming strategy is itself a form of brand thinking, intended to guide readers to first understand the product through the millet ingredient, the specific wines, and food pairings, rather than remaining confined to existing categories.

How were the three millet wines designed starting from cuisine?

The brand currently offers three millet wines: Yun Liu, Xin Xiang, and Yun Xiang, with product design starting from an imagined dish. This setup offers a way of reading the wines: beyond the grain ingredient, one can also consider what dishes each wine pairs with and what role it plays within a meal sequence. The branding and food-pairing design alone cannot be used to infer differences in fermentation or distillation processes compared with other millet wines.

What types of dishes do the three millet wines pair well with?

Current pairing collaborations with restaurants reveal the flavor orientations of the three millet wines. At La Vie by Thomas Bühner, chef Xavier Yeung paired Yun Xiang millet wine with sauce-grilled tuna jaw, green peppercorn, and spelt grains, achieving a balance between the wine and rich braised flavors. At Sawada in Breeze Nan Shan, sommelier Charlotte previously paired Yun Xiang with wagyu-wrapped abalone in Sichuan-style sauce, and currently pairs Xin Xiang with hazelnut ice cream and cheese, showing that either the same wine or different millet wines can correspond to both sweet and savory dish directions.

At Hosu, chef Li Yi-yan pairs Yun Liu millet wine with an optional add-on of Taiwanese beef, as well as the new dish Snow Rock Amber Chicken, a pairing leaning toward an interpretation rooted in local Taiwanese ingredients. Although all three millet wines are based on millet, their collaborations with different chefs reveal distinct flavor directions, reflecting how SLOWAVE has built in flexibility for dialogue with cuisine during product design.

Where can SLOWAVE's millet wines currently be purchased?

According to current information, SLOWAVE has not opened general retail channels; the millet wines are only available through partner restaurants, including La Vie by Thomas Bühner, Sawada, and Hosu. At Sawada, a foreign guest once purchased SLOWAVE millet wine directly from the restaurant after tasting it, indicating that this restaurant-based sales model does exist, though it remains limited to partner restaurants for now and has not developed into an independent retail channel.

The brand also mentioned increasing its use of locally grown Taiwanese millet, with Pingtung's Sandimen listed as one of its sources. This information allows readers to connect the product, ingredient, and location, but what can currently be confirmed is that it is "one of the sources"—it should not be extended to suggest that all wines or all ingredients come from the same growing region.