FEW WOULD ARGUE that, in Beijing, Yanjing is king. You do the maths: 640ml of beer and a two-yuan price tag (minus a five-mao refund on returned bottles). But against the odds, several local restaurant-bars offer their own in-house brews.
Two of the capital's best are German import Paulaner Brauhaus and venue-cum-microbrewery Get Lucky. Brewmasters Tom Zhang Wei and 'Yao' happily speak of their mission to please the capital's pickier palates but, unfortunately for yours truly, their mission doesn't extend to talking shop over a cold beverage.
When I sit with Yao, who's brewmaster at local rock palace Get Lucky and a 26-year veteran of the industry, I'm comforted by the fact that he's sipping from a beer stein. Thinking that he's taste-testing the newest batch, I hope I don't drool at the chance to play brewmaster with my own taste test. 'Which beer are you drinking?' I say. 'The dark or the lager?'
Yao says: 'Neither. 'It's tea.'
Having assured me that he prefers the dark brew, it's quickly clear that his penchant for hiding tea in his stein extends to his personality: in addition to declining to tell me his full name, he only describes his former brewery employer with a cryptic: 'You've definitely heard of the company - it's in Beijing.'
Get Lucky is also something of a tea-in-a-beer-stein - and an only-in-Beijing kind of place. The original club, a rock'n'roll saloon, opened in 1999 and regularly hosted local punk, metal, rock and rap acts. Most of those who took in the music eschewed the house 'yellow' and 'black' beers in favour of chugging cheap brews sneaked in from nearby shops. Meanwhile, at the back, pot-bellied, leather-clutch-purse-toting nouveau-riche managers gulp red wine on the rocks and XO by the bottle and sing their hearts out, accompanied by the bar's phalanx of tight-skirted hostesses. In its brand, new digs - renovated at a cost of five million yuan - local rock still rules the main room. The back rooms have gone upstairs, and upmarket.
