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?

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.