It has been slim pickings on this China trip for an old school craft beer brewery/taproom experience. I’m not complaining. I’ve grown quite partial to Fulujia’s IPA and fresh wheat of an evening or enjoying long necks of lager in a night market.
I enjoyed good nights at New Frontier Brewing in Urumqi and Off the Taps in Lanzhou (a post to come), but Gulou Craft Beer in Yinchuan delivered a very fun end to an interesting beer evening.
I started the evening off with high hopes with a visit to the Kempinski Hotel. It boasts an in-house brewery making German style beers and German food. Sounded good for a change. The set up is all there. Gleaming copper brewing equipment and plenty of wood and leather booths create a good looking space, but the beer is average at best.
Two in-house beers were on offer – a Helles and a Dunkel. 58RMB ($12.34) for 500ml each. As soon as I smelt the Helles, I knew something was off – I’m thinking the lines. Undrinkable. Reluctantly, I tried the Dunkel. At least it wasn’t off. Passable dark, but a little thin. Thankfully I hadn’t gone the 1l (98RMB). Disappointing, because I’ve good experiences in these types of places (The Kerry Hotel in Shanghai for example.
A real challenge of this trip is that is very difficult to find in Amap or Didi venues that Google lists. A classic example is “Xipike Elaborate Brewing Fresh Beer”. The name doesn’t match and the address only comes up in Didi. I took a chance that the place existed and was rewarded with a whacky brewery in the Xingping District.
This place had free-standing brewing equipment and the beer came direct from the tanks – fresh. Plenty of punters were coming in, but they were going straight to the Karoake Rooms, most of which were upstairs.
There three types of beer on offer, a lager, a wheat and a stout, with the wheat being the most expensive at 14RMB ($3) for 500ml. (A lesson in pricing for the Kempinski). I went the lager and the wheat, with the wheat being the stand-out. Good flavours. I’d have stayed but the Chinese were murdering whatever song book from which they were singing. I couldn’t extract the name of the venue from the gents – so aim for 937 Xinhua East Road, Xingping District, Yinchuan and take a punt.
I then went to Gulou Craft House to finish my evening. Now, I’d already been the afternoon before and met the husband of the husband and wife team that run Yinchuan’s oldest craft beer house. He told me that others have emerged, but Gulou was close to my hotel.
Gulou Craft House had had a big event a couple of nights before and that meant the list was a little thinner than the 12 taps. The beer list seems to be dominated by breweries from Xi’an, which is good news for me given I am heading to Xi’an shortly.
I enjoyed some IPAs the day before and on this evening the wife just handed me beers she liked. It is a great little venue in a narrow alley way a block away from Yinchuan’s actual Drum Tower, which lights up beautifully at night. There’s a few nice rooms upstairs as well. Just type in Gulou Craft into Amap to find it.
Another good beer experience can be combined with my other favourite thing to do in China, which is explore the food streets. The locals hang here and Xichun Night Market was only a couple of kms away. This is a great night market, because not only are there food stalls, there’s fresh produce as well.
I bought a bottle of beer, which was dispensed into a 1.25l plastic bottle for later. Never got around to identifying it.
I walked down the end of them food street and discovered two neighbouring fresh beer dispensers – my old mates Fulujia and a new mob for me – Pi Lang Jiu Yin. Pi Lang were happy me to grab some food and bring it back to the beer dispenser and sit down.
I went and bought some literal flame grilled scotch eggs and sat down to a couple of reasonable beers – fresh and cold. I tempted fate with a chocolate stout and was rewarded with a really good beer. Price point is the same as Fulujia (6 – 13RMB).
So whilst Yinchuan might be the capital of China’s most productive wine growing province, it is also (for this part of the world) a little bit of a beer town if you are prepared to look.
