Roll out the barrel

Great Leap Brewing founder and brewmaster Carl Setzer opened Beijing's first microbrewery with four taps in one location in 2010. Now Great Leap has 60 taps in three places and remains a part of the effort to define what craft beer is in China. [Photo provided to China Daily]

But there lies a change in beer preferences, with young, trendy consumers switching from dominant mass-produced industrial beers to imports and local craft beers.

At the Fourth Beijing Craft Beer Festival held on over two days last week, which organizers say drew at least 8000 visitors, a beer aficionado from Tianjin said: "China has so many beer brands like Tsingtao, Yanjing, Zhujiang, Snow and Harbin but essentially they taste very much the same. But beer can have very different tastes. That's why I love trying craft beers－the fact that you can experience so many different tastes."

Since 2012 imports of foreign beer in China have risen 737 percent, and at the same time many local craft beers have emerged.

Gao Yan, 48, who styles himself Master Gao, having obtained a master's degree in chemistry in the United States in the 1990s, is the founder of Master Gao Brewing Company of Nanjing.

When he tried to sell his first batches of hoppy bitter barley brown ale and IPA (which stands for India pale ale), in Nanjing in 2008, he says, it was like "crying out in the desert" because nobody in China had a clue what craft beer was.