Feel the Burn: Visit NBeer Pub’s Tent to Soothe Your Tongue at Our Inaugural Hot & Spicy Fest
In the lead up to our inaugural Hot & Spicy Festival on Apr 14-15 at Galaxy Soho, we'll Feel the Burn with a few of the vendors to see what fiery wares they'll be slinging come that rapidly approaching fine spring weekend.
As an admittedly old fart deeply indebted to craft beer, I (vaguely) remember the sweltering mid-summer day in 2013 when NBeer Pub opened the first Chinese-owned micro-brewpub in Beijing. Their original Huguosi location was a labor of love between its two founders: Yin Hai, a former computer engineer and first president of the Beijing Homebrew Society, and Xiao Bia'r, alias of Jin Xin, owner of Pass By Bar near Nanluogu Xiang and a certified beer geek.
The brewpub opened with a huge 37 beers on tap, including over a dozen in-house fermentation brews and the rest from domestic breweries (No. 18, Chengdu Harvest, Master Gao, Devolver, and Bubble Lab), along with imported kegs. During their solid five-year run, the two expanded to Sanlitun in 2015 (then closed in 2017), and opened a spacious pub in Wukesong in 2017 with 42 taps and a 7,000-bottle museum stocked with Xiao Bianr's collections. They now also have locations in Zhangzhou, Fuzhou, and Shenzhen.
Among their most popular brews in Beijing include Beijing Gose Modern, a contemporary take on the German gose (sour wheat beer) with 4.5 percent ABV and brewed with coriander and salt before being dry-hopped with American hops, and which won it a gold award at Brussels Beer Challenge in 2017. Then there's their Muddled Fixation IPA with 7.6 percent ABV, a New England-style beer brewed with a selection of specialty yeasts and hop oils to give it a heady kick. Older notable beers include the NB Ligui Black IPA, which Yin Hai first brewed in 2012 and which won China’s first homebrewing competition that same year thanks to its ferociously hoppy and bold flavor and round body with a bitter finish.
Over in the kitchen, NBeer stocks the usual pub grub mix of burgers, fries, potato wedges, cold cuts, sausages, fish and chips, seven varieties of pizza as well as nachos and a taco salad. For dessert, there's tiramisu, and if you fancy, even durian cheesecake.
When they attend our Hot & Spicy Festival on Apr 14-15, NBeer will bring along four of their favorite brews, including Beijing Gose Modern and Muddled Fixation IPA, as well as loaded baked spicy potato skins and spicy potato wedges to keep you coming back for more.
There will be about 40 of Beijing’s top purveyors of chili-infused grub at the event. If you haven't grabbed your RMB 20 presale ticket already, do so by scanning the QR code in the poster above or read more about what to expect here.
More stories by this author here.
Email: tracywang@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @flyingfigure
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Photos courtesy of NBeer Pub
