Roll out the barrel

Beer came to Hong Kong with the British, even before Hong Kong itself became officially a territory. In April 1842, months before the island's ceding was ratified by the Treaty of Nanjing, Alexander Matheson, of Jardine Matheson, reported in private letters that beer, porter and pickles were "pouring into this market", with the company's newly built godown in Hong Kong "full of the stuff".

In 1866, 11,977 barrels of beer, worth £38,346, were imported from Britain. British forces were particularly keen to ensure supplies for troops stationed in Hong Kong: a parliamentary select committee on "the mortality of troops in China" had been told that year that without beer being available, the troops would go into town and drink "a deadly liquor called 'samshoo' [a rice wine]", which cost four pence for a "reputed quart", a container the size of a wine bottle.

Only British beers - exported in casks and bottles - were available at first in Hong Kong, but the late 19th century seems to have witnessed a change in local tastes, with British ales and stouts being replaced by lagers from other lands. As early as May 1876, Lane Crawford was advertising "Danish beer from the Tuborgs Fabrikker". By 1901, Hongkongers were being offered Kirin from Japan - "a delicate lager" - in quarts and pints, and beer from three breweries on the American west coast.

Not until February 1904 did anybody propose opening a brewery locally. The Hong Kong Brewery Company announced it intended to erect a plant alongside the Metropole Hotel, on the then Shaukiwan Road (now King's Road) in North Point, by the new tramway. A watercourse delivering an "abundance of pure, good water, suitable for beer brewing purposes" ran through the site and the company had been "in communication with an experienced master brewer in Germany, with who we have arranged satisfactory terms", according to the Hongkong Telegraph newspaper. Nothing more is heard of this brewery, however, and the company was wound up in August 1906, apparently without ever producing a drop of beer.

Around this time, Imperial Brewing was founded by Portuguese businessmen A.A.H. Botelho and F.D. Barretto. It began operations in a converted house in Wong Nai Chung Road, Happy Valley, in late 1907, and a report the following year said its annual capacity was a substantial 76,400 barrels, while "large quantities of their products are being exported to the various ports in China". However, its beers failed to impress the local consul of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who wrote to Vienna in 1907 about Imperial Brewing's products: "Both flavour and clarity have much to be desired."

Imperial Brewing seems to have closed after only a year or two, pushed under, perhaps, by a combination of its own poor beers and the arrival of another concern, Oriental Brewery. Land for Oriental's plant was acquired in Lai Chi Kok in the spring of 1907, when it was announced that the consortium behind it intended to spend "over a quarter of a million dollars on an up-to-date brewery".

Oriental Brewery opened for business in 1908, with a capacity of 100,000 barrels a year, using brewing equipment imported from the United States. The promoters were Americans but it was led by an Englishman, Alfred Hocking, a Cornwall native who had emigrated to the US as a young man. Hocking had lived in Hawaii, where he started the Honolulu Brewing and Malting Company in around 1898, before moving to Hong Kong.