Tsingtao Beer Museum Doesn’t Disappoint

It was great to finally have a day off. Between getting ready to get here, traveling, and a long week working, it had been nearly two weeks since I had a day without everything being spoken for. I’m still not sleeping great, but was able to at least have a leisurely morning. I made it down to breakfast, and then got a chance to catch up on a few things like email and finishing a few blogs. I then went to the gym and ran and read for a bit, then went back down to lift some weights.

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Later that afternoon, I convinced seven others to join me for a trip to the Qingdao Beer Museum. Getting there was a bit of challenge since Uber requires you to enter your destination in Chinese. I ended up getting the front desk staff to put it in there for me… Only for the first driver to cancel. So I had to go back and try again, but this time I at least got a screen capture and watched him enter it so that I could do it again if necessary. Uber is apparently partially subsidized here, so the 25 minute trip was only about $1.

The beer museum itself is located at the original Tsingtao production sites, though things have obviously been updated since then. I’ve been on a bunch of brewery tours, but this one was very unique. They had all sorts of old memorabilia and old equipment from the original factory which was started over a hundred years ago. There were huge mash tuns that you could stick your head in from the old breweries, old thermometers, presses, fermentation vats, and lots of other cool things.

The location is also still a fully functioning brewery, so we got a chance to see a lot of the modern day brewing in action. The coolest part of the actually modern manufacturing process was the packaging process. You could see both the canning and bottling parts of the line very well –which was the coolest parts in my opinion. It’s amazing how fast they are able fill them without foaming. Everything was very automated with only about 6 employees working that part of the factory. We were wondering if some of the people were sleeping (they weren’t). The two most boring jobs had to be some kind of quality control where the guys were looking into each of the bottles to make sure that either the level was right or that there was nothing in it.

From a tasting perspective, they had two stops, one for fresh or raw beer that essentially had just finished the brewing process that morning, and a second that had been conditioned for some time. Interestingly enough, the fresh beer was more expensive than the one that’s been conditioned. And anecdotally, the conditioned one is much smoother.

After we finished the tour, we were going to catch an Uber back to the hotel, but we decided to walk to another street to try to have it going the right direction. It was at that point that we found something else to check off our Qingdao bucket lists… Drinking beer from a plastic bag. It’s apparently quite common here, but still very strange to me. However, it was something I said I had to try. They serve it with straws, so several of us shared a bag which was really fun. I don’t know that I’ll be trying it again, but I’m glad that I did it.

When we finally go our Uber, we decided that we would try to stop at the mall on the way home. Apparently our driver took the wrong way because it took forever to get there. After meandering through the Mix mall for a bit, we decided to go to a restaurant that some of the group had been before. We had these really good pork tacos and some odd, but good pasta things.

After dinner, I wanted to go back to see the band again, so we walked down there to listen to them for a bit. The same bartender that offered to give us a better price on beers was there again tonight and recognized me, which was great. Hussein (from Morocco) was essentially charging half the price (15 vs 28 RMB). Given that we were getting up pretty early on Sunday to go to the mountains, it was a much earlier night, but was still fun to go out for a bit.