One of the advantages of having house guests is that they give you a chance to do tourist things in your hometown. This is true whether you live in Washington, Paris or Beijing. We recently had friends from the District come to visit us during the Spring Festival. While we were in Qingdao, we took them to see the Tsingtao Brewery.

The Tsingtao Brewery is extremely cool, and I can’t believe it has taken us this long to pay it a visit. They have a very good museum dedicated to telling the history of the company, and it is gives a powerful portrait of Chinese History of the last hundred years. The Brewery began when this city was German concession. The colonizers wanted to drink the same brews they enjoyed back home, so they built a brewery and imported all the grain and hops they needed.

The Germans did not hold the city for long. The Germans were defeated by the English and the Japanese in the Battle of Tsingtao. The Tsingtao Brewery was then occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army, as was much of China.

For reasons that are not made entirely clear in this museum, the Japanese were defeated in 1945. The Nationalists, under the command of Chiang Kai-Shek, controlled the city and continued to produce the beer. Eventually, the brewery was liberated by the People’s Liberation Army.

The museum also contains a working brewery where you can watch bottles zoom down conveyer belts where they are filled, capped and labelled.

Perhaps the best part of the brewery tour came at the end. Maybe if we could read more Chinese we would know what was coming, but this took us completely off guard.

This room is built with a slanted floor and slanted walls, and it is a perfect simulation of the feeling you get after much too much beer. We had it all to ourselves and it was hilarious.

I felt compelled to write a full post about how we loved the Tsingtao Brewery because of the way we slammed the Beer Festival last August. We were so disappointed, we wrote two posts about how bad it was. Those criticisms still stand, but the Brewery is another thing entirely. If you are ever in Qingdao, it is definitely worth a visit.