It’s been called Asia’s Oktoberfest and is one of the largest beer festivals in the world. This time of year in Qingdao always means the kickoff of the 24-day beer festival, where more than 1,400 beers will be available to taste at any one of the three major venues in the city.
Qingdao has a rich beer history going back to when the city was occupied by the Germans from 1898-1914. The Germans introduced their drink to this area of China and even established the Tsingtao Brewery in 1903, which has gone on to be China’s most well-known beer export.
I’ve been to the Beer Festival in each of the three previous summers I’ve been in Qingdao and it’s always a good time. The main campus for the Festival is held out in Huangado, a district that lies across the Jiaozhou Bay and almost feels like traveling to another city. Near the famous Golden Sand Beach, a small city the size of an amusement park is erected to host the Beer Festival, which runs every day from July 31- August 23. There are dozens of tents offering up different beers, food, and entertainment.
The entertainment runs from traditional Chinese dances, to live calligraphy painting (as exciting as it sounds), to Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics, to beer-chugging contests, to drag shows, to live bands. Back in 2017, I saw Pittsburgh-originals Squonk Opera perform outside the main tent with their 50-foot-tall inflated Lady Pneumatic towering above the crowd.
Even with over 1,400 beers to chose from, the choices are unfortunately quite disappointing. While most beer festivals exist to showcase the smaller breweries, the Qingdao Beer Festival is all about the macro-beer labels. Budweiser, Becks, and Heineken are out in full force, as are many of the other massive international breweries. These breweries control the majority of the taps and you have to look long and hard to find something you wouldn’t be able to pick up any supermarket. The best place I’ve found for these is inside the German tents, which often carry many of the country’s smaller labels that are often difficult to find outside of Germany.
The strangest thing about the festival experience is that you soon realize that only a small percentage of people are actually drinking. It seems most of the Chinese just show up to people watch or take in the entertainment. Entire families will take over a table, usually bringing their own food. The children will run around close to naked in the sticky summer heat while dad might enjoy a pitcher or two by himself because, while most of the patrons aren’t drinking, the ones that do imbibe are more than making up for it.