2nd Edition of “How to Drink Beer in Mandarin” Updated with New Vocabulary, Breweries

The second edition of my e-book, How to Drink Beer in Mandarin, is now available for download. It has been updated with new vocabulary to reflect contemporary brewing trends—such as “collaboration beer”, “hazy IPA”, and “kveik”—and with a revised list of Greater China craft breweries, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The supplemental material has also been edited to bring industry trends and travel tips up-to-date.

The idea for this book originated with my “Mandarin Beer Word of the Day” campaign on Twitter. After extensive searching, I could find no single source of organized, standardized English-Chinese beer vocabulary, so it took me some time to compile a whole year’s worth of #MBWOTD. Then, having created a list of tweets to load into Hootsuite, I realized that they would be useful consolidated into a single glossary. But how to turn it into a more interesting book?

Arrogant Bastards, Tiny Devils, and Greedy Drinking

In October and November of 2019, I spent seven weeks travelling from Shanghai to Shenzhen to Sanya, visiting craft breweries and brewpubs in 30 cities in the south of China. My Great Hop Forward Southern Tour began with an impromptu tasting at Stone Brewery’s Shanghai taproom of fresh hop British Columbia beers that I had imported via my luggage. Then, leapfrogging down the East Coast, I arrived in Shenzhen in time to volunteer for the ever popular 5th Electric City Craft Beer Fest.

After a week in Shenzhen—the longest I stayed in one location—I travelled north to Qingyuan and Changsha, before heading west into Guizhou. I then looped south through Guangxi and Guangdong again to finish my quest on Hainan Island. On the last day of my adventure, I enjoyed a bittersweet lunch at Steam Rhino Brewing’s new brewpub in Sanya, before heading to the airport for my flight home.

What I experienced on this trip could fill a book. However, the days since my return have been too short and you are only expecting to read a blog post. Therefore, for the sake of brevity, I’ll distill my experiences down to a handful of anecdotes.

My Beijing Beer Quest

How I Visited 55 Craft Beer Establishments in China’s Capital So You Don’t Have To

With 35 craft breweries and counting, Beijing is clearly the craft beer capital of China. However, that’s not to say you can swing a cat and be assured of hitting a pub or bottle shop that offers something other than Chinese industrial light lager or “premium” imported suds. It’s still early days in the industry’s development. The capital city’s brewpubs and taprooms are also spread out, requiring some guidance and planning to fully appreciate the local brews without fruitless searching wasting your valuable time.

As part of my research into China’s craft breweries for my book, The Great Hop Forward, I recently visited Beijing to evaluate each of its local producers and their various branded taprooms. Beginning with 京A Brewing’s excellent 8×8 China Beer Project, I resolved to evaluate 50 establishments in 14 days. Setting aside two days for the festival, this amounted to an average of just over four stops per day.

By the numbers, my Beijing Beer Quest may not seem to be extraordinary. However, take into consideration the language barrier, the need for accurate location information, the necessary travel between stops, and having to drink for hours daily for two full weeks. It’s not as easy as it seems. As it were, this turned out to be an unprecedented achievement for even those who live there.

How did I do this?

Hong Kong’s Largest Craft Beer Celebration

Asia’s first craft brewery launched in Hong Kong in 1995 when I happened to be living there. Fast forward to 2012, the city still had only one craft brewery, despite the efforts of some enterprising individuals who saw the potential. Fortunately, when Canadian, Jonathan So, discovered the lack of craft beer events and a general apathy towards beer in Hong Kong, he decided to do something about it. He started the Beertopia festival.

When embarking on a venture, you never really know what will happen. Changing culture can be a long, drawn out process or it may happen overnight. Are people ready for it? Is what you’re offering attractive? Are you engaging people with the right messaging? Can what you’ve created be scaled up and leveraged to carry the change forward?

An Unexpected Turn

When I started planning the writing of The Great Hop Forward, I read that a successful Kickstarter campaign results from an audience built ahead of time. Therefore, the first thing I did was set up a Twitter account to do just that.

I like Twitter because I find it more conducive to establishing relationships than Facebook. I also like how Twitter allows you to create lists of those you follow in order to segment different audiences, communities, and information sources. And when you find suitable people or organizations to establish a relationship with, their followers are likely to be of interest to you, too, saving time hunting around for more followers.

To interest people in following you, you need to offer them something of value. My value proposition is to be the best information source in English for craft beer developments in China. I also want to encourage people to travel to China to experience the excitement of its economic and social transformation – craft beer being an interesting microcosm of that change.