Chinese beer is pretty good, and is about the best thing you can drink with Chinese food – pairing wine is difficult – but increasingly the country's middle classes, as elsewhere in the world, are having craft beers with their gong bao chicken and spicy tofu.
At the Beijing Invitational Craft Beer Festival recently, Irish brewers gave me a tour of the finer brews on offer with Sichuan pepper and black tea among the flavours.
Owen Scullion, brewery manager of Hilden Brewery in Lisburn, which is Ireland's oldest independent brewery and has an annual output of a million bottles, was making his first trip to Beijing, and their Belfast Bap wheat beer and Belfast Blonde ale were making a big impression on the punters.
“It’s been a bit hectic, but lots of interest. If it happens, we would send beer over here. For a small craft brewer, it’s about the product, and we go on trade missions, but they are never as specific as this . . . this is for people in the market and you get unfettered access to them and it’s a good opportunity for us to come out,” said Scullion.
Feedback
The next step however would be to see if it is feasible to send beer to Beijing. “We’ve had a few distributors and we want to get their feedback and to [talk to] people working here, and to customers,” he said.
A 20ft container with about 9,000 bottles of beer would be a good order as far as he is concerned. “But it’s not a good order unless it’s sustainable. We don’t want to send a one-off batch, it’s not worth the hassle, we are about sustainability. If we could get that every couple of months I’d be thrilled,” he said. “We can’t raise awareness here by ourselves.”
Great Leap
Scullion was invited to attend the fair by
Enda Winters
, who worked at the
Irish Embassy
before retraining as a brewer and now works for Beijing’s premier craft brewer,
Great Leap Brewing
.
“We put this on because we wanted to see who would come over, who was interested. If we can get brands in like Hilden and others, we’d love to get involved with that,” said Winters.
Great Leap has two locations in Beijing and is opening another bar in early January.
"You see brewers here from Taiwan and Hong Kong. There are opportunities for China in general. That's why we're here, right? We put up with the pollution because of the opportunity," said Winters, who comes from Termonfeckin in Co Louth.
New brewery
“The volumes are important here. If you get 0.001 per cent of the market you’re doing well. We added a new brewery last year and another in January. China overtook the
United States
on beer consumption in 2002 and it is much bigger now, although still less valuable.
For years China’s beer industry has been dominated by big national brands such as the Tibetan beer Snow and Tsingtao, which started life in a former German brewery in Qingdao. Big local brands such as Yanjing in Beijing and Harbin in the eponymous city are also strong sellers.
Anheuser-Busch Inbev and SAB Miller own bits and pieces of the various beers in China, but much of it is still locally produced.
The success of Great Leap shows it's not just about imported craft beers, and there are other big local names to conjure with, such as Slow Boat and Shanghai Brewery.
