Beer, Called Pijiu in China (Or Just Say Tsing Tao)

 

Tea is the second most drunken beverage in the world behind water, but I imagine beer isn’t too far behind. It’s popular in China, ancient home of tea. And like tea, beer seems to have found acceptance and favor in just about every place its been introduced. I think we can thank those Germans for bringing the process with them wherever they went.

They brought it to my hometown in Minnesota where the castle-like Grain Belt Brewery still stands on the banks of the Mississippi in Northeast Minneapolis. Though now the brewery produces art and design. But that’s OK, there are plenty of small, fine micro-breweries popping up in that hopping, but still neighborly, sedate neighborhood where I was taken home to as a baby and where my grandfather probably made a toast to me with some of the Grain Belt that was part of his pay as a brewery worker many years ago.

The Germans, like a few other western countries, got treaty concession rights to a port area along the eastern coast of China as the twentieth century began. China was in a bit of rough straits around that time, and so they had to make some deals. The Germans got a few square miles of pretty, hilly seashore in a place called Qing Dao. Yes it’s pronounced pretty dang close to Tsing Tao. My Chinese bar owner friend who spent a few years living in Switzerland, just says “Ching Dao” for “Ch” is the Chinese Pin Yin (Romanticized) pronunciation of “Q” and “Tsing Tao” is just a variation on the city name.

Anyway, all that etymology is to say, the beer was named after the city. On the label is the picture of the pavilion that sits at the end of a pier jutting right out from the old town. Qing Dao is a few hundred miles from where I’m living, so there is plenty of Tsing Tao around. But as well, most cities have their own beers named after the city as well—Yantai, Harbin, Beijing, and many others.

Well, one of the first things the Germans did when they moved into Qing Dao was to find a good spring and build a brewery over it. They don’t mess around. Like in Minneapolis, they built a big old brewery because they know there going to want to drink some beer. I suppose they figured out that once the locals get a taste of their frothy malt beverage, they’d probably want some too.

That old brewery lasted over 100 years, and just like the Minneapolis one, it’s still standing. The Chinese recently upgraded the faculties, but the old one is still there. Brewery tours are big business. There is whole street called Beer Street around the brewery. Seafood restaurants line the road and shiny silver kegs sit out front beckoning in visitors, as if 35-cent, fat, fresh oysters weren’t enough to draw you in. Oh, you can get a bag-o-beer to go for a couple of bucks from just about any restaurant, and there are hundreds of them.

Now just about all the beer in China is lager beer and typically not too strong, ranging in alcohol content from 2.8% to 4.8%. Besides the name of the beer, that’s about all an English speaker can read on the label. That means you can drink a lot of it, if you choose. Packaged, it’s predominantly sold in 750 ml cans or bottles (bombers or tall boys!).

Now that summer is here, every evening hundreds of tables and chairs are set up on the plaza in front of the modern mall beside my apartment tower complex. Long, rectangular electric grills barbeque up skewers of meat, vegetables and seafood. And what else is there? kegs of beer of course. Pitchers and glasses of beer sit on almost every white plastic table. Men and women sit—drinking, eating, and enjoying the evening.  

As with many of my peers, I’ve come to like and drink the splendid American ales that are being produced all across the country. But let me tell you, I sure didn’t stop drinking beer once I arrived in China. Your parents drank lagers, you’ve drunk lagers, and millions of people drink lagers. Beer is good. That’s not to say that I’ve been reconverted. One of the first things I’ll be doing when I get back to Minneapolis is buy a six-pack of Summit Ale.

China is changing so fast, taking in English and the world, it probably won’t be long before a few ales will be popping up. They are already. Yantai has one bar that brews a wheat beer. In Shanghai there’s a brewpub or two and when I was in southern China, in the mountain ex-pat town of Dali, a bar called the Funky Monkey, a Minnesotan was supposed to brew up beer, and a local bluegrass band would play many nights. I somehow missed out on that as I roamed the old stone streets inside the city walls during Chinese New Year.

As they say in China, “gambai!”