The Next Frontier of Hong Kong Craft Beer: Chinese Restaurants

The Young Master sits serenely in a private room at the back of Bowrington Bridge Hot Pot. Beefy steam fills the air as he watches his team of beermakers embark on a night of celebration. Someone uses a chopstick to pop open a large bottle of beer and pours it ceremoniously in the waiting glasses of the assembled diners. 

“Jam2 bui1 (飲杯)!” they exclaim, clinking their small glasses together in a roar of festive approval. “Cheers!” 

The Young Master — better known as Rohit Dugar, founder of Hong Kong’s largest craft brewery — looks on approvingly. “This is why we made this beer,” he says.

The beer in question is Young Master Grand, the first attempt by a Hong Kong craft brewery to break into the Chinese restaurant market that dominates Hong Kong beer sales. Craft beer is often associated with bold flavours and a culture of experimentation; local breweries are making Thai basil chilli sours, smoked lagers and milk tea-inspired stouts. But Grand is an experiment in something entirely different: it’s an easy-drinking lager meant to pair well with a boisterous dinner around a large circular table, in the kind of fun, no-frills restaurant where countless Hongkongers gather every evening.

Perhaps even more important than the liquid itself is the branding around it, something reflected by its Chinese name: Siu3 Je4 Daai6 Be1 (少爺大啤) – “Young Master Big Beer.” Whereas most craft beer in Hong Kong is packaged in small 330-millilitre cans or else served on draught in restaurants and bars, Grand comes in the large 640-millilitre bottles favoured by diners in Chinese restaurants. And the brewery has provided all of the essentials to go with it, including small 200-millilitre glasses and ice buckets with Young Master Grand branding (and a built-in bottle opener). 

A beer for Hong Kong

None of this is novel and that’s exactly the point. Most beer in Hong Kong is consumed in Chinese restaurants; Young Master’s market research suggests the market for beer in Chinese restaurants is up to five times larger than that of conventional bars and non-Chinese restaurants. For the most part, beer in these restaurants is served in large bottles meant for sharing, with diners filling each other’s glasses much as they would serve tea at dim sum. It’s something common throughout China and in Chinese-influenced parts of Asia, but rare to see in other parts of the world.

By throwing themselves into this market, Young Master are going head to head with mass-market brands like San Miguel, Carlsberg, Tsingtao and Blue Girl. It’s a side of the industry that relies as much on experience and the promise of a good time as it does on quality ingredients and good taste. In other words, it’s an attempt to reconcile craft beer with the grassroots culture of local beer drinking. What a pint in a corner pub is to London, a big bottle in a lively restaurant is to Hong Kong.

“Most people think of Young Master as craft beer, something unlike traditional commercial beer,” says Kay Ho, founder of the Hong Kong Beer Concern Group, a cheekily-named association of beer enthusiasts. Not craft beer geeks – just people who like an quaffable beer and see it as the gateway to a good time. He recalls attending Young Master’s free-flow beer dinners at Dai Lee, a Sham Shui Po dai pai dong, and thinking it felt like a foreign concept imposed on a very local setting. “This time they’re trying to cater to the taste of ordinary Hong Kong people,” he says. 

Craft beer has long relied on “converting” commercial beer drinkers to craft, but Grand has a different objective: bring the ethos of local craft beer to a typically Hong Kong kind of setting that until now has been served only by corporate brands that don’t necessarily reflect the city or its culture. 

The idea has been brewing since Young Master was founded in 2013. “From the beginning we wanted to be a locally rooted beer company,” says Dugar. “If we are truly trying to do that, we need to be associated with local dining. And while we’ve made a wide variety of beers, we also understood that food culture goes beyond pairing different types of beer with food. It’s also the format. We had to adapt and create something that fits within that whole culture as opposed to the typical craft beer taproom where everyone is drinking their individual portions.”

The unique dynamics of a Chinese restaurant

In Europe and North America, it’s a truism that restaurants rely on drink sales to survive. That’s not necessarily true for Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong. Beer isn’t quite an afterthought, but it’s certainly a background performer to the main act, which is the food. Bottles are priced affordably — anywhere from HK$20 to $40, depending on the brand and the restaurant — and are meant to be consumed in quantity. “That’s why in a lot of places you can bring your own bottle of wine or whisky,” says James Ling, a longtime bar manager who is now Young Master’s business development manager. “The beer is just there. It’s like water. They know people will be drinking it.”

To that end, Young Master needed to develop a recipe that was simple and unfussy without being completely unremarkable. The process began as Hong Kong was emerging from Covid-19 restrictions and people were once again gathering in restaurants. “It needed to be something versatile and approachable,” says Dugar. “We found that many of the mainstream beers had chosen the path of more watery lagers, which were based on adding rice or sugar that ferment out but lack body. We decided early on we wanted an all-malt lager which has enough robustness to hold up to wok6 hei3 (鑊氣), or spicy or fatty flavours, but which complemented the food without taking over the meal.” 

Young Master already makes a light unfiltered pilsner, but Dugar and his brewers felt that a food-oriented beer needed to be filtered, to give it more clarity and a crisper mouthfeel, and even less hoppy. “The bitterness level is slightly less than the pilsner but significantly higher than other lagers on the market,” he says.

The team developed the recipe at their brewery in Wong Chuk Hang, but when it came to production, they realised they didn’t have enough room to make it in Hong Kong. Young Master’s 40-hectolitre brewhouse is running at full capacity, supplying large batches of beer to local bars, supermarkets and convenience stores, and they also lacked the ability to package those large bottles that are so essential to the Chinese restaurant beer experience. They were also worried about making a beer that could compete in price with mass-market beers, which have the advantage of being produced in vast quantities by multinational corporations. Their solution was to brew Grand at a contract brewery in Changsha that makes beer for many craft beer brands in mainland China. 

Competing on price alone wouldn’t be enough, however. Though they may not be big on flavour, commercial beers are certainly big on branding. Tsingtao’s red, green and gold label is instantly recognised around the world as an emblem of Chinese beer; many other brands convey a similar sense of history and tradition, including Hong Kong-brewed San Miguel and Blue Girl, a brand made for the Hong Kong market by historic German trading company Jebsen.

When he was thinking about how Grand could stand out in a crowded market, Dugar was inspired by the story of graphic designer Henry Steiner’s pioneering work for Dairy Farm, which placed equal emphasis on the company’s Chinese and English branding. He hired local typeface designer Julius Hui’s studio Kowloon Type to create a custom Chinese font that would dominate a silver and red label, with Young Master’s logo of red kung fu pants perched discreetly atop the text. 

Craft beer branding has historically learned towards a certain idiosyncratic artistry. “We’ve departed from the conventions, and therefore we’re distinct and unusual,” is how renowned designer Milton Glaser once described its ethos. The sleek graphic identity of Young Master Grand places it firmly in the square of more commercial offerings, though not without a bit of crafty quirk. “It has a young, modern feel but at the same time looks like it belongs to the setting we’re in right now,” says Dugar, gesturing to the crowd around him enthusiastically plunging bits of beef cartilage and bean curd into a spicy hot pot. 

Every restaurant is unique

Grand was officially launched at a celebratory dinner last December at Rainbow Seafood on Lamma Island. Since then, it has slowly become available at a growing number of restaurants around Hong Kong, from Chiu Chow specialists Dynasty Chaoshan Pavilion (王朝潮順館) to Cheung Fat (祥發), a restaurant in a Wong Tai Sin public housing estate serving traditional Cantonese wok-fired dishes. But the process of selling beer to Chinese restaurants has turned out to be quite different to that of selling it to bars and other kinds of eateries. 

“There are a lot of personalities in this business,” says Kingson Kok, Young Master’s director of business operations and development. These restaurants are generally family owned, which means each one has its unique web of entanglements that need to be negotiated before they agree to stock a beer. Selling beer to Chinese restaurants is an exercise in relationship building more than just business.

Then there’s the challenge of selling it to diners. Many beer companies are represented by so-called “beer girls” who work a restaurant floor in short skirts and revealing tops, promoting their particular brand of beer and paying special attention to anyone who orders it by refilling glasses and quickly restocking empty ice buckets with fresh bottles of beer. To avoid sparking a turf war between rival beer girls, most restaurants reserve a specific day of the week for different brands, which can make it hard for a newcomer to break into the scene.

It’s still something Young Master is trying to reckon with. “At one restaurant, we had someone going around with red baggy pants and a white Chinese-style shirt,” says Kok. The sexism inherent in a beer girl’s skimpy attire is “what we’re trying to stray away from,” he notes. “What we want is essentially a beer sommelier coming around to explain and to pour.” 

It will take some time to build up the relationships needed for Young Master Grand to become a staple in Hong Kong’s 17,500 restaurants. But Kok says he’s had a particularly enthusiastic response from a new generation of eateries that are trying to inject youthful energy into traditional styles of restaurant. Bowrington Bridge is a good example: it opened in 2023 with nostalgic decor that includes red market lamps, mosaic tile walls and faa1 paai4 (花牌). “If you look around it’s all local style, and you want something local to go with it,” says Kok. “If you put our beer in a picture with this restaurant in the backdrop, it looks like it’s in the right place.” 

He says some of the best feedback he has gotten for Grand is from people who say its vibe is very “dei6” (地) – a word that literally means “earth” and is an integral part of the word bun2 dei6 本地 (local), as well as the expression “hoeng1 gong2 dei6” (香港地), which means something that is quintessentially Hong Kong. It’s terroir – but in a cultural sense.

A beer to share

In the back room of Bowrington Bridge, empty bottles of Grand accumulate as the brewery staff and their friends work at their hot pot. Among the guests is Paul Jones, founder of Manchester’s Cloudwater Brew Co., who recently brewed a collaboration beer with Young Master and has previously worked with other local breweries including Lovecraft, Heroes and Yardley Brothers. “I think it’s absolutely delicious,” he says, raising his glass of Grand. “When you’re having this kind of experience, sharing a meal, there’s no way each person is going to have their own selfish bottle of beer. It’s moving towards what people are doing and how they’re drinking beer. It’s meeting them where they’re at.”

The hot pot broth is still simmering as some of the Young Master staff turn on the karaoke machine at the back of the room and queue up standards by Leslie Cheung and other Cantopop artists. Dugar surveys the scene and echoes Jones’ comment. “It’s really about sharing and community,” he says. “Everything is communal and that extends to the drinks. That’s Chinese dining. And this beer just feels right for it.”