Produced | Tiger Sniffing Young Group

Author | Zhazha County

Title image| From the interviewee

This article was first published on Huxiuyoung content public account “That NG” (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the faces, stories and attitudes of young people today.

“The foreigners who go to Shanghai are still foreigners; and when they go to Beijing, they become hutong strings.”

Beijing or Shanghai? On reddit, some foreigners always chatter about which of the two cities is better. Some people think that walking on the Bund in a three-piece suit with a flat pierced collar can only be regarded as experiencing the surface of China, a superficial expatriate experience; and only if you are in a Beijing alley wearing a “big master bikini” eating Panggezhuang watermelons, you can really gain Chinese memory.

In this regard, Kris and Alex, two foreigners who brewed with Beijing-style garlic flavored cucumber and Mentougou Shanlihong (hawthorn in Beijing dialect), are the most experienced of them. They are the founders of Beijing A Beer.

Not only did they choose to live in Beijing, but in the eight years since the opening of Beijing A, from 1949 in the Sanlitun Electrical and Mechanical Compound to the Kerry Center store in China World Trade Center, Kris and Alex have also been trying to turn the city’s customs into taste, using beer. Remember the form and spread it out.

Beijing A founder Alex & Kris

Image source: Beijing A official website

Eight years ago, they entered and exited the high-end office buildings of Apple and Cisco, with decent positions and a worry-free life. But one day, they decided to break away from this kind of regular life, and chose to use the unreliable hobby of private wine making as a business that took root in Beijing.

Since the two people’s Jing-A Brewing Co. was established in 2012, it is now called one of the best craft beer houses in Beijing by the travel bible “Lonely Planet”; Jing-A has become One of the cultural landmarks of Beijing, so that the surrounding Hoodie they go out will be taken home by foreigners who visit here as a Souvenir Jacket and become a souvenir of the mysterious Eastern journey.

How did all this happen? When Kris and Alex keep going back and forth on the east-west route, what does Beijing mean to them? How many stories we don’t know about Jing A’s mysterious wine barrel?

Picture source: Lonely Planet

When the two foreigners decide to brew Beijing in wine|Tiger Cha (click here to listen to the full program)

vol. 129

Guest: Alex, Kris

Anchor: Watermelon, Zhazha County

Recording, editing: Seven Six Three

When I was young, when I kept a diary, the teacher’s most taboo was the running account. He will always teach you to grasp the big and let go of the small, so that you can use the most memorable things in life as an anchor to record your life.

At one point, Kris and Alex and the elementary school teacher can give a high five. Now the two brothers who live in Beixinqiao Hutong all use the shirtless uncle, who is sitting on the bluestone in the Hutong and eating watermelon just soaked in ice water, as an “anchor.” This is the most Beijing-like picture in their eyes.

Picture Source: Watermelon in Beijing (1989), Dalin Xuanyan

In order to reshape this picture, they developed a watermelon-flavored wheat light beer called “Zhangzi” many years ago.

In the development stage, in order to perfectly melt the picture of Beijingers eating watermelon into alcohol, the two even went to North together.