Chinese craft beer did become a real scene, and then the version of it that foreign drinkers knew fell apart. A boom roughly a decade and a half long produced serious breweries in a handful of cities, drew money from the largest beer company on earth, and then lost most of its pioneer taprooms to closures between 2021 and 2025. What survived is aimed at Chinese customers rather than at the expatriates who started it. That is a better story than the hype version, because the reasons the first wave broke have nothing to do with the quality of the beer.
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Why The First Wave Of Taprooms Closed
- The pioneering rooms were built for expatriates, and when that population shrank the venues had no second customer base to fall back on.
- A taproom and a bottle trade are different businesses wearing the same name, since cans need a packaging line, cold storage and freight that a single room cannot fund.
- Look for the survivors rather than the pioneers, because the breweries that came through the cull now sell to domestic occasions through menus and delivery apps.
- Treat the local-ingredient beers as the ones worth seeking, since they are the only versions of the style that could not have come from anywhere else.
Two Facts Worth Stating Plainly
China is the largest beer market in the world by volume, which is the fact that most coverage circles and rarely says out loud. Beer also became the most widely consumed alcoholic drink in the country measured by volume, a change that gathered speed through the 1980s and was complete by about 1990. The detail lost in the retelling is that baijiu still dominates on the measures the drinks trade cares about, because a spirit at 40% contributes far more pure alcohol per glass, and far more margin per bottle, than a lager at 4%.
Lager Is The Import, And It Arrived Early
China's long fermented-drink tradition runs through rice and mould starter rather than through malted grain and hops, so huangjiu and baijiu come from a different process than anything called beer, and brewing as most readers understand it arrived from abroad at the start of the twentieth century. Harbin opened in 1900, established by the Polish brewer Jan Wróblewski to supply the Russian workers building the Trans-Manchurian railway, and Tsingtao followed in 1903, founded at Qingdao by German and British merchants. Both brewed in the Bohemian pilsner manner, which is why a classic Chinese lager reads as Central European in the glass.
Tsingtao's global profile is a distribution achievement more than a taste one. It became the export name because it could be shipped reliably at scale, which is why it sat on the table at Chinese restaurants across Canada long before most drinkers here had heard of a Chinese microbrewery.
How The Craft Scene Began
One caveat before the video: it documents Taiwan, which built its own craft scene separately from the mainland market this article is about.
The modern scene started as brewpubs in a handful of cities, and it started as a business built for people who had already drunk hoppy beer somewhere else. Boxing Cat opened downtown in Shanghai in 2008 and is generally credited as the city's first craft brewery, with Beijing's wave following shortly after. The pattern repeated for years: one room, a food menu written for foreign appetites, an IPA on the coil, and regulars who skewed toward expatriates and returnees.
That format explains much of what followed, because a taproom and a bottle trade are different businesses wearing the same name. A brewpub can live on the margin from one room's pints, while cans mean a packaging line, cold storage, freight and shelf fees, which is a larger operation than most small Chinese brewers ever funded. AB InBev bought a stake in Boxing Cat in March 2017, and the reaction among domestic brewers was less about the money than about what it implied, since the company running China's volume market thought flavour was worth owning.
What The Beers Do Differently
Where Chinese small brewers get distinctive is in what goes into the kettle after the hops, and the best-known example is not a novelty stunt. Great Leap Brewing in Beijing built its reputation on Honey Ma Gold, a blonde ale made with Sichuan peppercorn and local honey, carrying a citrus top note and the faint numbing tingle the pepper is prized for in the province that names it. Wild West Brewing, outside Chengdu, puts the same pepper into a wheat beer for the same reason. Jujube and osmanthus have both been used the way a North American brewery might use mango.
None of that guarantees a good pint, and an ale built for drinkers who do not prize bitterness can land thin and sweet. The reason to pay attention to the local-ingredient beers is that they are the only ones in the category that could not have come from anywhere else.
What Happened To The Pioneers
The narrow customer base is what broke the first wave. Boxing Cat's Beijing site closed in 2021, and in 2025 AB InBev shut the remaining food and drink venues it owned in Shanghai, which took out Boxing Cat and its sister bar Liquid Laundry and left only Goose Island trading in that city. Kaiba and Shanghai Brewery had already gone before 2023. The causes are structural. The foreign population that filled those rooms shrank, chilled delivery across a country that size costs more per kilometre than drinkers assume, and distribution is fragmented region by region in ways that punish a small brand trying to leave its own city.
What Survives Is A Different Business
The breweries that came through the cull mostly stopped selling to foreigners. Jing-A and Slow Boat are still brewing in Beijing and still running taprooms, with Slow Boat marking 14 years in 2025. Great Leap is still open, but its American founders left during the pandemic years and no longer run it. Newer operators such as Panda Brew have bought larger equipment and pushed toward a national footprint. The shared moves are a Chinese-language menu, sales through e-commerce and delivery apps, and a product pitched at domestic occasions.
One correction is worth making, because the name keeps turning up in older write-ups of this market. Helen's is not a brewery. It is a franchised bar chain founded in 2009 and listed in Hong Kong in 2021, running hundreds of outlets aimed at drinkers in their twenties, and it sells beer rather than making it. The wider market explains why the pivot had to happen. Chinese beer production peaked in 2013 at just over 50 million kilolitres and has fallen by roughly a third since, so growth is no longer a matter of volume. Craft is the slice still reported as expanding while the market around it shrinks, and the two names that set the price of everything else remain China Resources Beer, which sells Snow, and Tsingtao.
Why A British Columbia Reader Should Care
Because the same pressure is visible at home. The BC Craft Brewers Guild reported roughly 20 permanent closures across the province during 2025, and it now represents a little over 200 members, down from its high-water mark in the pandemic years. Seen from there, the Chinese experience is a diagnostic rather than a distant curiosity. It shows what happens to a taproom business whose regulars are one specific sort of person, and what it costs to move a perishable, chilled product across a large geography with weak consolidation. Those two problems look the same whether they sit in Shanghai or in the Fraser Valley.
Frequently Asked Questions About Chinese Craft Beer
Is Boxing Cat Brewery still open?
AB InBev closed its remaining Shanghai venues in 2025, including Boxing Cat and the sister bar Liquid Laundry, and kept only Goose Island trading in the city. The Beijing branch had already shut in 2021. Any article that lists Boxing Cat among the current leaders of Chinese craft beer was written before those closures and has not been revised since.
What do Chinese breweries actually make?
Almost all beer produced in China is pale lager in the Bohemian school, often brewed with rice alongside barley malt, and that is true of the national brands and of most regional breweries. Craft breweries work through the international range, so you will find hazy and West Coast IPAs, wheat beers, sours and barrel-aged bottles, plus the local-ingredient versions that give the scene its identity. The flavoured beers attract the coverage abroad, but they are a small share of what gets poured on a weekday.
Can you buy Chinese craft beer in British Columbia?
Expect the big export lagers, which are easy to find, and treat anything small-batch as a lucky sighting. The first-wave breweries were built around taprooms rather than export, so the volume that ever left the country was modest, and the closures took what export lines existed with them. That sets up an awkward inversion. The local-ingredient beers are the ones worth seeking and the ones least likely to travel, because the pepper and the honey versions were never built for a shelf, and the pale lager that exports easily is the one that tells you nothing about the place. If a Beijing brewery's can turns up near you it is worth the purchase, and it will taste like a competent international beer with a local signature rather than like something exotic.
The Lesson Is About Customers, Not Beer
Chinese brewers were not the weak link in this story. The beer was good, the festivals filled, and medals came back from international competitions. What failed was a business model that assumed one type of customer would stay put, in a market where total volume had already peaked and where reaching anyone beyond the city limits was expensive. If you drink at a neighbourhood taproom in British Columbia, hold that in mind the next time a brewery changes its menu, its hours or its prices, since those are the moves a business makes when the people it built itself around have quietly stopped coming.
