Harbin Brewery

Harbin Brewery, founded in 1900 in the city of Harbin, is China’s oldest brewery and ranks as its fourth largest. It dominates the market in Northeast China and produces the Hapi beer brand. After a successful restructuring and a listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, the brewery boosted its annual production capacity to over 1 million tons, making it a major force in the country’s beer industry. However, its presence in European and American markets remains small compared to brands like Tsingtao or Zhujiang. In North America, Harbin beer first appeared in ethnic Chinese supermarkets, which are still its main retail outlets, and has since slowly spread to other Asian grocery stores.

The brewery’s history began in 1900, when Jan Wróblewski, a Pole from Tarczyn (then in the Russian Partition of Poland), founded a brewery in Northeast China—then called Manchuria—and named it after himself. Its original purpose was to supply beer to Russians working on the Trans-Manchurian Railway, a project that had started in 1898. In 1908, the company was renamed Gloria. In 1932, it became the Harbin Brewery Factory under joint Chinese and Czech control. After the Soviet Red Army captured Manchuria in 1946, Soviet nationals took over and called it Quilin Stock Company Limited. That arrangement lasted until 1950, when Stalin ordered the return of Chinese assets, and ownership passed to the Chinese government, which renamed it Harbin Brewery and ran it as a state-owned enterprise. During a famine in 1959, the brewery became the first to brew beer using corn instead of rice. Throughout the 1960s, it invested in technological improvements, and in 1973 it installed Heilongjiang Province’s first sterilization machine. In June 2003, SABMiller bought a 29.6% stake in Harbin, but the following year Anheuser-Busch took over after a fierce bidding war with SABMiller.

Harbin Beer is a pale lager with 4.8% alcohol by volume. It is made with European and Chinese “Qindao Dahua” hops, two-row malt, and German yeast. The brewery’s other beers include Hapi, Golden Hapi, Harbin Heart, Harbin Premium Lager, and a wheat beer.