Nobody Told The Irish: How Guinness Became The Official Drink Of Hungry Ghost Month
Guinness Foreign Extra Stout has become the unofficial drink of the Hungry Ghost Festival — demanded by underworld deities, channelled through spirit mediums, and traced back to a colonial-era health tonic that nobody intended to become a spiritual instrument.
- Guinness became a Hungry Ghost Festival offering because its dark colour, "Black Dog" nickname, and medicinal reputation made it spiritually fitting.
- Spirit mediums channelling underworld marshals and the Crazy Monk deity gulp Guinness during rituals, treating it as a genuine spiritual instrument.
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Every seventh lunar month, roadside altars across Malaysia and Singapore fill up with the familiar: economy rice, peanuts, cigarettes, and cans — sometimes open bottle — of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout.
Nobody told the Irish.
When Guinness arrived in colonial-era Malaya, the older Chinese generation did not treat it as alcohol; they treated it as medicine.
Dark, bitter, fortifying — it was believed to enrich the blood, restore vitality, and expel wind from the body.
The Hokkien community gave it a name that stuck: O-Gau — Black Dog; the Cantonese called it Hak Gau (黑狗) or Hak Gau Peh (黑狗啤) — Black Dog Beer.
That name mattered more than anyone realised at the time.
In Chinese folk cosmology, black carries underworld associations.
A dark foreign drink with a black-dog nickname, consumed by working men at kopitiam tables, arrived at the spirit altar carrying exactly the right symbolic weight — and nobody planned it that way.
The tonic became the tribute, and a generations-old habit became the offering.
The following photos were taken at the annual Hungry Ghost Festival sendoff celebration in Section 17, Petaling Jaya.
The Two Uncles of the Underworld
Within Chinese folk religion, the spirits of the seventh month do not wander unsupervised — they are managed, escorted, tracked, and dispatched by two figures known in Hokkien and Teochew as Tua Pek Yeh and Ji Pek Yeh.
First Uncle and Second Uncle, White Impermanence and Black Impermanence.
The top marshals operating directly under the Ghost King, Tai Su Yeh; they could not look more different.
Tua Pek Yeh — the First Uncle, White Impermanence — is tall and thin, dressed in white robes, wearing a tall white hat inscribed with the words: “Become Wealthy Upon Meeting Me.”
His long red tongue protrudes from his face, yet despite his unsettling appearance, he is beloved — rewarding the virtuous, granting lottery luck, and dispensing wealth fortunes to devotees who approach him correctly.
Ji Pek Yeh — the Second Uncle, Black Impermanence — is shorter, dark-skinned, dressed entirely in black, carrying chains and a wooden tablet.
His function is the opposite of his brother’s; he tracks down unruly spirits, punishes the wicked, and tolerates no nonsense.
When tang-ki — spirit mediums — enter a trance to channel the duo during Hungry Ghost Festival rites, devotees line up with cold bottles of O-Gau.
Devotees come bearing cold bottles of O-Gau and leave with talisman papers and lucky numbers — a transaction so fitting that the black dog beer and the black-robed marshals of the underworld seem made for each other.
The two uncles are the famous ones, but the hierarchy runs 18 deep — one marshal per layer of hell, growing fiercer with each descent, and every single one of them drinks Guinness.
Chai Kung Demands It Too
Then there is Chai Kung.
Known also as Ji Gong — the Crazy Monk, the Living Buddha — Chai Kung is the deity who broke every monastic rule: eating meat, drinking alcohol, wandering in tattered robes, helping the poor while ignoring rigid formality.
His mythology does not merely permit intoxication. It requires it.
According to folk belief, his spiritual power increases the more intoxicated he becomes.
During Hungry Ghost Festival rites, tang-ki channelling Chai Kung mimic his drunken steps, wave a tattered cattail leaf fan, and gulp Guinness straight from the bottle.
The O-Gau nickname fits him precisely: rugged, unfiltered, working-class, answering to nobody.
The medium does not simply drink the stout.
Within the ritual logic, the deity consumes it, neutralises it, and returns it transformed — a blessing for devotees, a ward against malicious spirits roaming freely during the seventh month.
Guinness, in this context, is not an indulgence; it is a spiritual instrument.
The Logic That Connects It All
Three independent pathways — colonial tonic, underworld marshal, and drunken monk deity — arrived at the same destination.
If Guinness fortified the living, the reasoning held that it would fortify the dead.
If O-Gau suited the kopitiam uncle, it suited Ji Pek Yeh’s dark, uncompromising nature and Chai Kung’s deliberate rejection of respectability.
Families laying out roadside offerings during the seventh month included what they valued — and for generations of older Chinese men in Malaysia, O-Gau was the drink of choice.
The offering followed the habit, the habit followed the belief, and the belief followed the nickname.
Guinness Foreign Extra Stout was first brewed in Dublin in the 19th century; it reached Malaya through colonial trade routes.
It was adopted as a health tonic, acquired a Hokkien nickname, became a kopitiam staple, crossed from the table of the living to the altar of the dead, and ended up being gulped straight from the bottle by spirit mediums channelling both a chains-wielding underworld marshal and a drunken monk deity.
No marketing campaign produced that outcome.
Tua Pek Yeh, Ji Pek Yeh, and Chai Kung have no complaints — and neither, it seems, does a brand whose harp logo has been quietly evolving since 1862.
READ MORE: Hungry Ghost Festival Designated As State Heritage In Penang
Part of this article is based on reports by The Standard. All photos by the writer.
The spirits get the Guinness. You get home safely. Do not drink and drive.
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