Who made Yesa

Who makes Yesa?

General Fermentation Pte. Ltd., registered in Singapore, with a sister company in Hong Kong. Two founders, no marketing department.

The company exists to make one kind of beer properly, which is why the brewery going up in the Greater Bay Area is being built for that one thing rather than converted from something else.

Who is Jongeon Kim?

Co-founder and chief executive. He grew up in Korea and spent about eight years in private equity, mostly in Singapore, at GIC and then EQT. He was admitted to the Wharton MBA, then dropped out to keep the capital for this.

He drank the way the Asian finance circuit drinks, until the data from an Oura ring and a Whoop strap kept saying the same thing: one beer wrecked his sleep. He stopped in February 2024 and has not had a drink since. In Singapore he is, as far as anyone has been able to tell him, the only Korean who does not drink.

Every non-alcoholic beer he could buy was named after something it lacked, and tasted like it. He found the cold physical method in small breweries in the United States and Europe, imported the beer, and watched people choose it over a Heineken without noticing it was non-alcoholic. Then he set out to build the process in Asia.

Who is Todd Su?

Co-founder and head brewer. Born in mainland China, in Hong Kong since he was nineteen. He is a mechanical engineer with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and he built data-centre infrastructure across Europe and Asia, which is precision work in thermal dynamics and fluid systems.

In 2020 he left it to start at the bottom of a brewery, milling grain and washing kegs. Within three years he was head brewer at one of the largest craft breweries in Hong Kong. He holds a Diploma in Brewing and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Brewers and Distillers, and he developed the recipe now sold as the city’s best-selling craft non-alcoholic beer.

He left that job because the traditional craft route has a ceiling and he wanted to engineer past it. In his words: if a beer has everything a great beer has but no alcohol, he would choose that one a thousand times over.

How did they meet?

Jongeon cold-emailed brewers across Singapore and China asking whether anyone wanted to build a dedicated non-alcoholic brewery. Almost all of them said no. Todd said yes.

Todd is head brewer and runs the brewery. Jongeon is chief executive.

Why did they start Yesa?

Because drinking less should not cost you the drink. In Asia almost every non-alcoholic beer on the shelf is a compromised version of a real one, and the person holding it looks like they are settling for something.

Fixing that is a process problem before it is a brand problem, which is why the answer was to build a brewery rather than hand a recipe to someone else’s.