Booze News: GLB + Orchid CNY Party, 5th Invitational Craft Beer Fest Announced, Gruit at Slow Boat

Feeling thirsty? Wet your whistle with Booze News, our weekly wrap-up of the week's best bar deals, parties, drink concoctions, industry gossip, and more.

Great Leap Brewing Announce Fifth Beijing Invitational Craft Beer Festival

Great Leap has announced their fifth annual Beijing Invitational Craft Beer Festival (BICBF), returning to TRB's Copper events space Mar 29-31. As with their previous festivals, it'll be spread across five all-you-can-drink three- or four-hour sessions. Tickets cost RMB 228 per session, RMB 628 for a weekend pass, or RMB 1,028 for the VIP treatment and get you access to over 80 unique beers as well as all-you-can-eat canapés provided by TRB.

This year, over 40 breweries will attend from over 15 countries from around the world, and all the beer has been flown in fresh by Great Leap Brewing just for the festival. Speaking from experience, it's one of the best ways to discover what's happening in the world of beer further afield and makes for a jolly (and a little sloppy) way to break up the weekend. Tickets are now available via 247 Tickets or at all three GLB locations. Hops to it!

Sticking with Great Leap, they'll be ringing in the Year of the Pig with their traditional New Year party at the Orchid, Feb 4 from 8pm onwards. For RMB 300 (RMB 288 advance), revelers gain access to free-flow mulled wine and a whopping nine varieties of GLB beer as well as finger food from the Orchid Hotel’s in-house Mediterranean restaurant, Toast, and their newest project – Furongji (read our recent, and quite effusive, review of that cool little spot right here).

Tickets can be purchased through the Orchid’s WeChat (ID: theorchid), by scanning the QR code in the poster above, or at any Great Leap Brewing location.
 

Gruit Beer Launch at Slow Boat

Unless you're the world's biggest beer nerd, you're unlikely to know that today is in fact International Gruit Day. Heck, you probably don't even know what gruit is – god knows we didn't. Good job Slow Boat is here to fill us in, launching their very own take on the pagan tipple, which should be available at around the end of February. As they explain: "Before the widespread adoption of hops in the 14th and 15th centuries, brewers in central Europe used a mixture of local herbs and botanicals to add bitterness, flavor, and stability to their beers. Dutch (and subsequently German and Belgian) brewers called this mixture 'gruit.'"

True to the original, Slow Boat's take on this olde brew, a collaboration with South Korea's Gorilla Brewing, skips the hops in favor of Korean ginseng, Chinese bay leaf, sage, juniper branches, and mugwort (pictured above). The result should hopefully be "funky, potently spicy, lightly sour, and earthy. Something to drink out in the woods during a secret pagan ritual." Sounds pretty gnarly to us! While you wait for the final product to hit the taps, read up on everything you ever wanted to know about gruit right here.

Before you head out for a drink this week, make sure to check if your favorite watering hole is open.

Images: mountainroseherbs.com, courtesy of the promoters