Great Leap Brewing () is a Chinese organisation operating four brewpubs in Beijing. It makes and sells a variety of beers at those locations, popular both within the city's Western expatriate community and youth Chinese drinkers interested in alternative products.
After it opened in 2010, Great Leap Brewing became the first microbrewery in Beijing that specialized in craft beers with Chinese ingredients, and the longest-tenured one currently brewing. Founder Carl Setzer along with Dane Vanden Berg, another American expatriate working for an information technology company in Beijing at the time, were frustrated by the narrow choice of beers available in the city. With Liu Fang, Setzer's Chinese wife, they first began brewing in a former siheyuan on a hutong in the city's Nanluoguxiang neighborhood. The location, still open, has been described as being "one of the most difficult bars to find in Beijing".
Eventually, it expanded to two other locations and began offering a range of up to 40 beers at different times of year, with an infusion of venture capital. Setzer left his job to run Great Leap full-time in 2011.
The brewery has focused on using Chinese ingredients in its beers, including Sichuan pepper and Tieguanyin oolong tea, and branding that draws on Chinese history and culture, in a successful effort to attract Chinese consumers looking for an alternative to the country's national brands.
History
2004–2009: Prehistory
Carl Setzer, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, first came to China in 2004 after graduating from college in Alabama, at the behest of some fellow graduates doing missionary work there.Sinica, at 5:00 He worked at Dongfeng Motor, the country's leading truck manufacturer, in the Hubei city of Shiyan, for a year. There he met and befriended Liu Fang, a Shandong native, before returning to the U.S. for graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh, after which he went to work in Taiwan.Sinica, at 6:20
In 2008, he returned to China, setting up the Beijing office of an American information technology firm. Setzer, who had not been much of a drinker until the previous year due to a family history of alcoholism and a religious education, was disappointed with China's national beer brands like Tsingtao. He often complained about them to Dane Vandenberg, a fellow employee back in the U.S. The two realized that Beijing was an ideal market for a microbrewery, much like those that had sprung up in Setzer's native region of Northeast Ohio. "Never let a market that has a requirement go unsupplied," Setzer told CNN later.
Within six months of his return to China, Setzer and Liu got married. The couple traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands, where visits to local breweries helped Liu realize that all beer did not have to taste the same. Back in China, Setzer, whose German great-grandfather had worked at a brewery in Frankfurt, began learning how to make beer, while Vanden Berg, in California, raised money from investors.
Craft beers were not unknown in China at that time. Brewpubs were already in operation in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In Beijing itself, there had been some brewpubs and German-style beer halls operated by Munich-based Paulaner Brewery since the early 1990s that catered both to expatriates and to Chinese made prosperous by the reform and opening up that began at the time. But there was nothing like the craft breweries that had sprung up in the U.S. since the 1980s, "places where you knew the service was always going to be great, where the stuff was always going to be on draft," Setzer said later.Sinica, 10:35.
The three found an old siheyuan, or courtyard house, on Doujiao Hutong, a narrow side street in central Beijing's Dongcheng District near the Nanluoguxiang area, with many other bars popular with the city's Western expatriate community, and the Bell and Drum Towers, an area popular with younger Beijingers. They began remodeling the turn-of-the-century library, part of a Qing dynasty mansion, for use as a brewpub, keeping the decor to a minimum in order to concentrate on the beer and send that same message to customers. "We did this with not particularly high expectations, without a lot of economic motivation", Setzer told All About Beer in 2012.
Accounts of how the brewery got its name differ. Vandenberg says he came up with the name "Great Leap" for the risk he and Setzer were taking. However, a 2016 article reported that Liu's grandfather suggested it. The name carries connotations of strength in Chinese. Great Leap's website cites a Song dynasty poem by Chén Shùnyú (), "Bull Riding Song" (), which the brewery translates as "to take a great leap when you are young and fat," differing somewhat from the actual meaning (), but nonetheless evoking the courage the founders displayed in starting it. Additionally, the name contains the same characters as the Maoist Great Leap Forward campaign.
2010: Opening
In October 2010, Setzer decided to open the brewery, financing it with $17,000 in savings. He hosted a party at the siheyuan, inviting a fellow American attending the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study, at Tsinghua University, whom he had shown the beer to as he brewed it, to come down and try it. The friend invited his roommate, who informed his friends about the party and very soon, an event intended for just a few people was hosting 60 studentsSinica, 12:00. coming down from Wudaokou.
Using ingredients and equipment sourced domestically in order to reduce operating costs, he brewed on Sundays and opened for only the three days before that, serving from nine kegs, which he recalled later seemed like a large amount at the time.Sinica, 18:30. The company offered four beers—Pale Ale #6, named for the building's street address; Oatmeal Porter, Cinnamon Rock Candy Ale and Honey Ma Blonde. The latter two used distinctly Chinese flavoring adjuncts to make up for the paucity of Chinese malt varieties: large-bark cinnamon in the former, and a combination of Sichuan pepper and honey from a Shandong apiary run by relatives of Liu's.
Patrons could consume their beer on premises in pint glasses, for which they were charged depending on the variety. They could also take it home in liter-sized growlers for ¥60–80, or bottles with a ¥30 deposit. All prices were slightly higher than those charged for Chinese national brands at the time. The only food available was spicy peanuts and (sometimes) dried malts; there was no prepared food.
A particular early area of concern for Great Leap was relations with the neighbors in its out-of-the-way residential area. "Strangers in hutongs are never welcome," according to Setzer. To prevent noise complaints, the brewpub closed no later than midnight, and even earlier in summer and during university exam periods.
At first, as Setzer had expected, the clientele was almost exclusively Westerners. Staff at the American and British embassies were early regulars and strong supporters. Initial reviews were positive. "The simple fact is that this place has no gimmicks or frills," wrote the English-language China Daily near the end of the year. "[I]t makes some of the best beer in town."
City Weekend, a newspaper for expats, also gave Great Leap publicity, thanks to an intern who had attended the opening weekend. This in turn came to the notice of journalist James Fallows, who had recently returned to the U.S. after several years of reporting from China. In his blog for The Atlantic, where he had often complained about the poor quality of beer in not just China but Asia as a whole, he promised readers he would be on the next flight back to Beijing to try some of Great Leap's offerings. The existence of beer flavored with Sichuan peppercorn in particular excited him. "With that in beer, I suppose I'll never again be able to complain about bland Chinese beers."
2011: Success and challenges
In January 2011, Setzer quit his job to work at the brewery full-time. "Everyone around me told me I was crazy," he recalled to USA Today later in the year. That spring Vanden Berg came to China to take a more active role in the business. The warming weather improved business as patrons could sit outside. Enough other bar owners came by asking if they could sell the beer that Setzer decided it was time to get into distribution. Sales were so strong that by the summer Great Leap was converting a farmhouse in Tianxianlu,Sinica, at 29:30 near the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, into a brewery, using equipment better suited to large-scale industrial production, to meet demand.
As Setzer had hoped, younger Chinese drinkers, many of whom had been introduced to craft beers abroad, were joining the expatriates as customers. By July they were making up 70% of the brewery's customer base. "Some come, they think, 'That's a bit weird,' and leave after one drink," Liu said. "But then they come back the next day, the next week, and bring their friends, too." She observed that, among younger Chinese, the longstanding tradition of consuming alcoholic beverages only in the form of grain-based spirits with meals seemed to be changing thanks to the introduction of beers like Great Leap's.
Setzer continued to expand the available beers, introducing a new one each month on a seasonal basis, and making it a permanent offering if it did well, like a chocolate cardamom stout. "I want to do ever-crazier beers," he said to USA Today. "There are so many different spices and flavors in Chinese cuisine that have not been defined chemically yet."
One of those beers was Iron Buddha Blonde, which uses oolong tea, an ingredient Setzer says is particularly well-suited to use in brewing,Sinica, 21:15. as an adjunct. "[It] gives the beer a floral note at the end," he explained. The name was a play on the name of the tea variety used, tiě guānyīn (铁观音), which means "iron goddess of mercy."
At the other end of the scale was his Little General IPA, a beer in a style Setzer had not originally planned to make but produced in response to customers' demand for one.Sinica, 17:00. As a "purity" beer with only those ingredients allowed by the German Reinheitsgebot (malted barley, hops yeast and water), it had no special flavoring ingredients. But its name came from Zhang Xueliang, a patriotic hero in China and Taiwan. In the late 1930s he kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek, persuaded him to ally his Kuomintang with the Communist forces against the Japanese, then surrendered to Chiang's forces after the kidnapping, to be exiled to Hawaii where he died in 2001 without ever returning to either China or Taiwan.
"We take pride in the recipes, names and stories of our products and so far our Chinese customers also take a lot of pride in that," he said later. He noted in 2015 that the beers with Chinese names and ingredients are the most popular with Chinese customers, a phenomenon he likened to the way American craft beer had taken off when brewers started to use American ingredients rather than importing traditionally used hops and grains from Europe.Sinica, 20:45
Late in the year Great Leap faced its biggest challenge. Due to fallout from some of China's food safety scandals, authority for granting licenses to distribute food and drink was moved from the China Food and Drug Administration, where the brewery's application had been pending, to the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. The new agency gave Setzer the choice of either expediting the license for the original brewpubs, or taking the chance on the full distribution license, but with likely dire consequences if Great Leap's beer was found to be unsafe. At one point he was threatened with deportation and Liu with jail.Sinica, 37:00 (Setzer believes the real issue was that their product wound up outselling Guinness at an Irish bar, which led them to stop that distribution model for a while.)