If you were to draw a "beer planet" map, you would likely highlight Central Europe – the Czech Republic, a country that has held the world's top spot in per capita beer consumption for over thirty years and is striving to have its beer culture recognized by UNESCO.

However, in the East Asian corner, you would notice an unexpected point – Harbin. A Chinese city whose per capita beer consumption surpasses that of most major European and American cities. One place views beer as a cultural heritage, while the other sees it as a strategy against the cold. They are separated by approximately 7,000 kilometers, Siberia, and the entire Slavic expanse. But if you look closely, you will see a thin thread connecting their glasses from bottom to top. The story begins in 1898. The construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway transformed Harbin from a river settlement into an international transportation hub. Russians, Poles, Germans – and Czechs – arrived.

In 1900, a Polish merchant with a Russian passport, Jan Wróblewski, founded the first Chinese brewery ("Wróblewski Brewery") in the Nankang district – the predecessor of today's Harbin Hapi Brewery. A year later, in 1901, a Czech named Emory founded the "East Bavarian Brewery" in the port district, with an annual capacity of 1,000 tons. In 1932, the management of this oldest Chinese brewery passed into the hands of a Czech, Gavlíček, and a Chinese, Li Zhu-chen, and it officially received the name we know today – "Harbin Brewery."

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The Czech attitude towards beer can be summed up in one word: national pride. In the Czech Republic, beer is not just a beverage – it is the operating system of society. The traditional pub is a second parliament alongside the assembly. You sit down, and a glass is automatically placed in front of you; the bill is written on a small slip of paper. Pouring beer is a craft – the side tap, the foam as thick as whipped cream, which is not just decoration but an engineering solution for air insulation and freshness preservation. In 2025, the Czech Ministry of Culture added beer culture to the list of national cultural heritage and is striving for recognition by UNESCO. The average annual per capita consumption is around 128–144 liters (slightly decreasing in recent years, but still with a significant lead), which is roughly a little over one bottle per day.

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For Harbin, on the other hand, beer is a social glue in temperatures twenty to thirty degrees below zero. The beer culture of Harbin takes a completely different path: from ice and fire. The main driver of beer consumption in Harbin is not a "tasting tradition," but a chemical reaction between the climate, the way of life, and dietary habits. In winter, when temperatures drop to -20 to -30 °C or even lower, the culture of covered markets, barbecue stands, and heated kang (traditional brick beds) creates a year-round, uninterrupted ecosystem of outdoor drinking. In the old days, special horse-drawn carriages traveled through Harbin, delivering keg beer from house to house, and wooden buckets hung outside pubs on Zhongyang Avenue as a sign.

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If Czech beer is a thousand-year-old tree with deep roots – every sip is a tribute to some monastic recipe from 993 – then Charbin beer is grass growing through the cracks between railway ties. It has survived and thrives to the point where one could drown in it. But its character remains wild, indifferent to the shape of the foam.

Marie Liu

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