A weekday evening at The Ale Project, a Hong Kong craft beer bar that has attracted a more local Chinese crowd than other expat-dominated beer bars. Photo: Christopher DeWolf
Not long after the launch of One Beer, Two Systems, I find myself sitting on the patio of Jing A’s new Beijing bar with Kristian Li and Richard Ammerman, who handles the brewery’s marketing. Though it was launched less than two years ago, Jing A is already one of Beijing’s most popular craft breweries, with a line of beers that balance staples like IPAs and stouts with distinctly Beijing concoctions like the Big Slice Watermelon Wheat.
“Watermelons are such a popular snack in the summer,” Ammerman says. “You see people hauling them around in the hutongs,” the ancient alleyways that form the heart and soul of Beijing. The watermelon comes from a farmer just outside the city who has developed his own strain of melon. “He’s rough and tumble, the kind of guy who eats watermelon, drinks and smokes at the same time.” Another farmer provides Jing A with chestnuts for its autumn seasonal brown ale. “We’re interested in seeing where these things are actually growth,” says Ammerman. “Also, it’s cheaper.”
Last year, Jing A released a beer made with sweet potatoes and cumin, a nod to a staple of local street food. The brewery also made the first commercially released beer fermented with baijiu yeast, which is normally used to make China’s ubiquitous firewater. “We’re probably not going to make a beer that has chili oil or stinky tofu,” Ammerman says. “There’s some Beijing ingredients that just don’t sit well in a beer.”
He pauses and thinks for a moment. “Actually, I have always wanted to make a yangrou chuan’r beer,” he says, referring to the spiced lamb skewers that Muslim street vendors serve all over the city. Li looks excited, then contemplative, as if he is preparing a recipe in his head. “You’d need a little bit of the smoke and savory, some cumin in there, maybe a little bit of heat.”
Beertopia, Hong Kong's annual craft beer festival. The 2015 edition included 11 breweries from Hong Kong and mainland China.
Photo by: Christopher DeWolf
Jing A’s bar is located in the expat-heavy bar district of Sanlitun, where it is joined by a handful of other brewery taprooms, along with countless bars whose fridges are stocked full of imports like Rogue and Brewdog. But the birthplace of craft beer in Beijing is a few miles away, in a small grey brick house in a hutong whose history stretches back several hundred years. That’s where I meet Carl Setzer, who opened Great Leap Brewing in 2010 with his wife, Liu Fang. He is sitting in the courtyard patio next to the trunk of a poplar tree whose leaves are rustling in the wind.
“That’s where it started,” he says, pointing to a shed nearby. Great Leap’s first two beers were the Honey Ma Gold, a blonde ale made with floral Sichuan peppercorns, and the Cinnamon Rock Candy Ale, made with Chinese candied sugar. Since then, the brewery has expanded to two new brewpubs, with a suite of distinctive beers, including many made with tea—a tricky feat, since brewing beer with tea often results in unwanted astringency.
But it isn’t tea that Setzer has on his mind; it’s hops. Great Leap is one of the only craft breweries to rely heavily on Chinese-grown hops, especially the indigenous Qingdao Flower hops, which have a floral aroma and a creamy, almost melon-like flavor. I’m drinking a pint of Hop God Imperial IPA, a showcase for Qingdao Flower. Setzer jabs his finger at my drink. “This is Chinese—Chinese malt, Chinese hops,” he says. “We didn’t start using imported hops until later. I’m still the only brewery in China that believes in Qingdao Flower hops.”
If it seems like Setzer has a chip on his shoulder, it’s because he does. “People call me the Beer Dictator,” he says. For years, he has called out unprofessional practices among Chinese craft brewers, like misrepresenting production output, that could turn off customers and scare away future investors. He tells anyone who will listen that China’s other craft brewers aren’t doing enough to make their beer, well, Chinese. That goes beyond adding tea or chun pei or chestnuts to a brew; it means developing the same kind of high-quality infrastructure that craft brewing has in the United States, from malt production to hop growing to production and distribution.
IF IT’S JUST A COMMODITY, THEY’RE GOING TO TREAT IT LIKE ****
Setzer has reason to be discouraged. He tells me that he recently switched from using pelletized Qingdao Flower hops to whole dried hop flowers, which are delivered compressed into a bale. “When you’re breaking apart the pressed flower, you’re finding cigarette butts and stones, pieces of metal and ****,” he says. “You’re like, okay, if I’m finding it in the compressed bale, then it’s definitely going through the hammer mill and getting into the pellets.”
He found out why when he visited China’s isolated hop-growing region in September. “They’re cutting down the hop bines and dragging them across dirty floors. It goes to the long-term attention to quality and love of what the process is. If it’s just a commodity, they’re going to treat it like ****.”
Chinese hops are grown in the country’s far northwest, in poor regions that haven’t seen much investment. Flood-based irrigation limits yields, pickers damage hops and hop bines are stunted growers don’t have the right equipment to harvest the tall bines needed to produce the most flavorful, aromatic hops.
“If you go to Yakima Valley, every farm is totally automated. In China, they hand pick them in the field, or they hand cut them and drag them, losing 20 percent of the flower,” Setzer says. “It’s a very eye-opening realization that if it’s not a development zone outside a first-tier city that they use for marketing, it’s going to be 50 year old technology that nobody cares about, and there’s only one guy in the entire region who knows how to fix it because he’s the one who took the training course when they bought the equipment.”
Setzer says industrial brewers don’t care because they don’t use many hops in their beer, so it’s up to China’s craft brewers to ensure that the country’s hops are up to snuff. Global demand for hops has never been higher, but this year’s hop harvest in Europe and the United States was poor. Chinese craft brewers might soon have no alternative but to use Chinese hops—if they can address the issue of quality. “There’s a massive opportunity here to just give the proverbial finger to anybody that thinks that China needs to cower in the wake of international craft beer,” Setzer says. “We’re sitting on what everybody wants.”
It’s heavy stuff, but Setzer’s mood brightens when the conversation turns to the potential of Chinese beer. “The success we’ve had has inspired a lot of brewers to be more brave,” he says. Earlier this year, he imported some kegs of Young Master Ales to Great Leap. “When I see Rohit do something similar [to us] but incredibly specific to Hong Kong, I swell with pride. It’s amazing.”
Drinkers seem to appreciate the effort too. When I get back to Hong Kong from Beijing, I learn that Young Master has released a new collaboration beer with Shanghai’s Boxing Cat Brewery: the Four Leaves IPA, made with makrut lime leaves. “It’s like how dish soap smells, but in a really good way,” says James Ling when I order a glass at TAP.
I take a sip. It’s an oddball beer, with a hoppy bitterness that gives way to the pronounced zing of lime leaves. As it warms, I can taste the distinctive flavour of Sorachi Ace—lemony and savory, like dill pickles. It’s very good. And I can’t imagine drinking it anywhere else.
Christopher DeWolf
Christopher DeWolf is a Canadian journalist based in Hong Kong who writes on urbanism, culture, art and design. He writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal and South China Morning Post and his work has appeared in TIME, CNN and the Guardian. He lives just a short walk from the rooftop farms of Yau Ma Tei.
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