Leo Is Thirty-Five Baht and the Good Beer Is Not in a Bottle
The cheapest beer in Thailand is not the one in the fridge, it is the one on draught in a plastic bag at a roadside stall, and it is genuinely better than most of what you will be served later.
A roadside stall, a plastic bag hooked over the side of the container, an orange lager that has been poured fresh and is the temperature of the day rather than of a fridge, and 35 baht for a bag as big as your forearm. This is the best-value drink in Thailand and it is available almost anywhere, and the reason tourists miss it is that they are sitting in a bar being charged 180 baht for something in a bottle.
Last verified 5 September 2026.
The two beers that matter
Singha is the national beer and it is the stronger, more bitter one. Around 5% alcohol, properly bitter, with a flavour that survives being cold and does not survive being warm. This is what a Thai person orders and it is what you should order if you want to know what Thai beer tastes like.
Leo is lighter, milder, cheaper, and much more widely available on draught. Around 3.2% in recent years, which is noticeably lower than it was, and it is a lager in the sense that it is smooth, easy and slightly bland. It is not a bad beer. It is the beer you drink when you are not tasting, and in a hot country that is most of the time.
Chang, and Chang Draft specifically, is the one people in Thailand actually drink most of, and it is cheap everywhere. Draught Chang in a plastic bag is the cheapest good drink on this list.
Foreign craft and imported beer exist in Chiang Mai and Bangkok and are good and are four to eight times the price, and it is a completely different evening.
What it costs
A plastic bag of draught Leo or Chang at a roadside stall: 30 to 40 baht.
A bottle of Leo at a restaurant: 60 to 90 baht.
A bottle in a bar: 100 to 180 baht.
Draught in a bar: 90 to 150 baht, often a good deal for a fresh one.
An imported or craft beer: 200 to 400 baht.
And the markup on a bag at a stall versus a bottle in a bar is roughly 400 percent, for a product that is made on the same street from the same water. That is not a complaint, it is just a fact about how alcohol is priced differently from the way it is priced almost everywhere else.
Why the bag, and how it works
Fresh draught beer in a plastic bag is sold from a polystyrene cooler with a tap, and the bag is filled from a spigot and handed to you tied. It is a genuinely Thai institution and it is the best way to drink a Thai lager.
It is warm, or at least ambient, and that is deliberate. Thai draught beer is served at cellar temperature rather than ice cold, because it is a light lager and cold flattens it, and because the tradition is built around a warm afternoon. Western lager is served ice cold for the opposite reason. Neither is wrong and the difference is real.
It is also stronger than you expect, because a 3.2% beer at ambient temperature and at a slow pace over a long evening is a different quantity of alcohol from the same beer cold and quickly. Pace yourself.
The rules, which are not widely known
There is a national curfew: alcohol cannot be sold between 11:59pm and 2am. This is a real restriction and it applies everywhere, so a 7-Eleven will not sell you a beer at one in the morning and neither will most restaurants.
And there are proximity restrictions. Sales are prohibited within 500 metres of a school, and there are restrictions around hospitals, temples and administrative offices. This is why a convenience store near a temple is closed at 8pm while one two streets away is open. It looks arbitrary from outside and it is a mapped exclusion radius.
Sale to under-20s is prohibited and it is enforced in the serious places and not in the others.
And you cannot drink and drive, in a country where the road fatality rate is already high. This is not a slogan, it is the reason the taxi exists.
What to order, honestly
Order a bag of draught Leo or Chang at a roadside stall at least once. It is the best-value thing you will drink and it costs almost nothing, and the experience is unlike anywhere else.
Order a Singha when you want to taste the country's beer. It is the better beer and it is worth the extra baht once.
And do not pay 180 baht in a bar for a bottle when the same beer is 80 in a restaurant three streets away. The difference is the room, not the beer, and that is a perfectly good reason to be in the room, but it is not a reason to drink better beer.
