WHAT’S BREWING?
Craft beer bubbles up in China as its middle class spends more cash,
SHANGHAI— Panda Beer, Little General, Flying Fist IPA and Mandarin Wheat were among the offerings on tap at a craft beer exhibition last week in Shanghai dedicated to expanding the palette of Chinese consumers and promoting sales of high-end brews.
The 2018 Craft Beer of China Exhibition featured breweries such as Rasenburg Beer, Myth Monkey Brewing, Lazy Taps, Goose Island and Boxing Cat Brewery, which shared tips on the latest technology and sales trends as Chinese shift from legacy brews to more experimental, refined and expensive flavours. From taps at the expo flowed creative mixes of flavours and traditions, a swirling cocktail of Chinese ingredients, barley, hops and spices from around the world.
“After drinking (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 craft beer consumer at the expo who dreams of brewing his own.
There’s money to be made in China, which drinks a quarter of all beer worldwide, and small-batch brewers and giant multinationals are cashing in. Though craft beer is far from upstaging local beer behemoths such as Tsingtao that dominate the $28-billion (U.S.) national beer market, it is rising in popularity as small breweries open up in China’s major metropolitan areas such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Craft beers are typically more expensive than mass-market, low-alcohol content brews such as Budweiser and China’s Yanjing. But as China’s middle class grows, so too does its tastes for finer products.
A couple of years ago, craft beer made up only 0.3 per cent of total beer consumption. It has since risen to about 5 per cent, said Darren Guo, one of the exhibition’s organizers, who expect to see 30-per-cent growth in the craft beer market every year until 2020.
Laurel Liu, sales director of Beijing-based Jing-A brewery, said 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.
“I’m really surprised and happy to see now that craft beer in China is a thing and it’s really easier to access these products now.”