Beer In Situ: Beijing Double Feature

Two Brewery places to review today: Great Leap Brewing and a random one called simply Drunk. This will be an abbreviated version of the Beer In Situ post, with a bit of information but nothing too in-depth.

The Pertinents

• Great Leap Brewing
• Three locations in Beijing. 6 Doujiao Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China is the original where we went. 
• Founded in 2010 (first craft brewery in Beijing)

Short Review 

Fairly hard to find at night, and we just managed it when we had almost given up. The selection is some of the best that we’ve seen in China in terms of styles, and all of them were quite good. We ended up having way more beer than we meant to, especially because the taster flight was not available after happy hour.

They let you order in food, which we took advantage of. The pizza place we tried was cheap and delicious. The staff are friendly, and the crowd appeared to be mostly travelling folks on a stop in Beijing the night we went. Almost no Chinese were visiting when we were there on a Tuesday night.

It’s a great space and feels very Beijing.

Just wandering around in Beijing is really fun and interesting. There is so much to see, and by getting lost it’s possible to see even more. We really enjoyed wandering around and seeing the city, especially on the alleyways called hutong.

Beijing really is Kate Moss and some pizza slices. We stumbled upon the second beer bar just near to our hostel (Saga Hostel).

The Pertinents

• Drunk
• 249 Dong Si Nan, Dongcheng District
• Founded in 2015

Short Review 

It’s clearly a place trying to capitalise on the craft beer industry’s rise. Swanky and with a feel like a Korean cafe. The food was decent and Western, if a little pricey. The staff were nice but my lack of real Mandarin made it hard to talk about the beers. You order using an ipad. One drawback was that they seemed unable to change the music, so the whole half hour we sat down there same shitty pop song was on repeat (‘It’s better if we don’t speak at all…at all…at all….It’s better if we don’t speak at all….’).

We had a tasting flight, and it was okay. The best one was probably what I assume to have been an APA. Light, fruity and refreshing. There wasn’t any information about which beers we were actually drinking. The beers tasted a little like homebrew, which makes sense because the place just opened recently. Maybe they will improve with practice.

A good little place to hang out, but maybe not the best for hardcore beer nerds and/or Cicerone types.