American Craft Beer The Best Craft Beer, Breweries, Bars, Brewpubs, Beer Stores, And Restaurants Serving Serious Beer.
The beer biz never sleeps at American Craft Beer. And here’s some more of what’s been happening in the beer world, while you were binge drinking yourself through the weekend.
Craft Beer Arrives In China (Shanghai) – China’s largest industry beer gathering, the 2018 Craft Beer China Conference, touched down in Shanghai last week and according to the AP, the three-day trade conference was the talk of that beer-drinking nation.
The 2018 Craft Beer of China Exhibition drew more than 10,000 professionals this year, and cutting-edge local craft breweries like Rasenburg Beer, Myth Monkey Brewing and Lazy Taps. It also attracted Big Beer funded ‘craftys’ like Goose Island, which has grown its presence significantly in China and Shanghai’s hugely popular Boxing Cat which AB InBev purchased in 2017.
Beer is huge in China and multinationals like AB InBev and even Diageo have been positioning themselves aggressively to cash in on the enormous market…But so have up-and-coming Chinese craft organizations like the Beijing’s Jing-A and Great Leap breweries. And outfits like Gweilo Beer, Hong Kong’s largest craft beer brewery which just opened a new 14,000-square-foot US$5 million brewery.
Words To Drink By (Eugene, OR) “Craft beer is currently only 5% of China’s market…. But I expect to expect to see 30% growth in the craft beer market every year until 2020.” – Darren Guo CBCE 2018
New Belgium Celebrates 20th Anniversary Of Its Wood-Aged Sour Program (Ft Collins, CO / Ashville, NC) – On March 27th New Belgium is celebrating their prodigious wood-aged sour program that now spans two decades. And they’ll be dressing up La Folie, the beer that started it all, in its original cork and cage packaging as part of that celebration.
Developed by Peter Bouckaert back in 1999, La Folie, New Belgium’s Sour Brown blend, was the country’s first commercially produced sour according to PorchDrinking, and they added that it “still features the oldest continuous souring culture in America.”
And in addition to winning numerous Great American Beer Festival awards, New Belgium’s La Folie has, as Tristan Chan correctly notes, “inspired thousands of American brewers and beer drinkers to embrace barrel-aged mixed culture sour beers.”
