Happy Year of the Rat
In honor of Chinese New Year I had decided to buy some Chinese beers to blog about, so over the weekend I bought a Harbin and a Tsing tao, from the fourth and first largest breweries in China, respectively. Although I’ve only tried the Harbin, both beers are lagers in the German style, as is common throughout much of Asia. Apparently the Harbin brewery was founded by a Russian and started out life as Ulubulevskij Brewery, at least according to Wikipedia. I’m thinking that they needed to change that name for branding purposes alone, although it suited the original purpose of supplying Russia workers in Northeastern China with beer.
As for the beer itself, it was a pretty straightforward lager in the style of a Dortmunder or something equivalent. As one of the reviewers here wrote, it had a bit more of a bitter aftertaste than I like, and not in a good way, but it certainly wasn’t terrible. I’ll be checking out the Tsing tao later on in the week, but according to Michael Jackson’s report on beers to accompany dog for dinner, I can expect a little more from that beer than from the Harbin.
The really strange thing about Harbin, this not-very-well-known Chinese beer, is that it’s owned by Anheuser-Busch. I had written a post on my other blog about the difficulties of determining nationality for products, and this just proves the point - all products are international at this point, whether you want them to be or not.
image from travelblog.org
Tags: anheuser busch, beer, china, harbin, international, tsing tao
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