Tsingdao Brewery

Of course, no trip to Qingdao would be complete without a trip to visit the Tsingtao Brewery, home of what it likes to boast as China's number one imported beer. (Never mind that I'm pretty sure China doesn't import any other beers anyways.)

Now this was not my first trip to a beer brewery (nor my last, I suspect) and I have to say that the brewery tour for Qingdao was a bit lacking. The exhibits and models at Tsingtao were about on par with other breweries I've visited; however, if we're going to be honest here, visiting a brewery is really all about the beer tasting at the end. Leslie & I were very excited about the tasting and were hoping that we could get the chance to taste the other types of beer they produce, since they're harder to find outside of Qingdao. But when we got to the tasting room, we only got two very tiny glasses of their basic beer that you can get anywhere. We were very disappointed.

However, they did have a drunk simulation room at the end of there brewery tour that almost made up for the lack of variety in their tasting room. If you're wondering what exactly a drunk simulation room entails, it's basically a room tilted at at 30 degree angle, which sounds simple enough until you try to walk up the slope. Now that's a challenge. Needless to say, the drunk simulation room proved itself to be very entertaining.

Later that night, to make up for the pathetic beer tasting at the Tsingtao Brewery, Leslie & I conducted our own tasting in our hostel room. We ended up tasting three different types of Tsingtao beer, all of which I had never seen anywhere else besides in Qingdao. Sadly, they were poorly labelled so Leslie & I aren't exactly sure what we were tasting. We do know one was a Tsingtao stout, or as some people know it as, the black Tsingtao beer. As for the other two, all we can say is one had a red label & one had a yellow label. Overall, we really liked the Tsingtao with a red label and didn't really care for the other two. Although, the stout did have a really strong coffee after taste.

Sadly, our pictures of our little beer tasting using coffee mugs are lost on Leslie's stolen memory card/camera. (Stupid pick-pocketers.) So you guys are going to have to use your imagination for that. However, here are some pictures from the brewery tour, including one from the drunk simulation room! Whee!

Apparently, the Tsingtao brewery has the same slogan as
many universities.
Then again, beer & college do go hand-in-hand, at least in the US.

Don't be fooled by the picture.
Objects in the photo are smaller than they appear.

Leslie's drunk! Just kidding.
Welcome to the drunk simulation room, where you laugh so hard
you blur in the photos.