Panda Beer, Little General, Flying Fist IPA, and Mandarin Wheat are among the offerings on tap at a craft beer exhibition this week in Shanghai dedicated to expanding the palette of Chinese consumers and promoting high-end brews.
The 2018 Craft Beer of China Exhibition features breweries, such as Rasenburg Beer, Myth Monkey Brewing, Lazy Taps, Goose Island and Boxing Cat Brewery, that are sharing tips on the latest technology and sales trends as Chinese shift from legacy brews to more experimental, refined and expensive flavors.
From taps at the expo flowed creative mixes of flavors and traditions, a swirling cocktail of Chinese ingredients, barley, hops and spices from around the world.
Photo: AP
“After drinking it [craft beer], it feels much better than the domestic industry beer, and then you just can’t leave it,” said Yu Shiqi, a 40-year-old who dreams of brewing his own beer.
There is money to be made in China, which drinks a quarter of all beer worldwide, and small-batch brewers and giant multinationals are cashing in.
Although craft beer is far from upstaging local beer behemoths like Tsingtao (青島), which dominate the US$28 billion national beer market, it is rising in popularity as small breweries open up in China’s major metropolitan areas like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Craft beers are typically more expensive than mass-market, low-alcohol content brews such as Budweiser and China’s Yanjing (燕京), but as China’s middle class grows, so too does its tastes for finer products.
A few years ago, craft beer made up only 0.3 percent of total beer consumption. It has since risen to about 5 percent, exhibition organizer Darren Guo said.
Guo expects to see 30 percent growth in market every year until 2020, he said, adding: “Beer culture is pretty much on the beginning or starting level.”
Laurel Liu, sales director of Beijing-based Jing-A Brewery Co (京A啤酒), said that she gets calls from small towns asking how to start up a craft brewery.
“You don’t even expect them to have craft beer there but now they do,” Liu said.
More money was spent on beer in China than the US last year, beer industry research firm Drink Sector said.
Craft breweries are “rapidly increasing” although foreign imports continue to dominate the high-end beer sector, it said.
Michael Jordan, brewmaster at Boxing Cat, and his staff experiment with flavors like egg tart, green tea, peppercorn, chai, kiwi, hibiscus and sweet potato.
Jordan chalks up some of the success of craft brewing in China to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sharing a pint of Indian Pale Ale (IPA) in 2015 with then-British prime minister David Cameron in the UK.
“The ‘Xi phenomenon’ really kind of opened people’s eyes to IPA,” he said.
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