Beer Festival’s mascot

The 16th Qingdao International Beer Festival starts on August 12 in Qingdao City, east Shandong Province. Qingdao boasts a beautiful coastline and a pleasing climate in the summer when it’s unbearably hot in Beijing. It is also slated to host the sailing matches of the 2008 Olympics. Sounds like a good idea to go and see what happens at this beer festival.

Qingdao International Beer Festival began in 1991. It opens on the second weekend of August each year, in the middle of tourist season in Qingdao, and lasts for 16 days. The festival includes many activities like beer tastings, literary evenings and beer-drinking competitions.

This year’s festival will be held in three main venues; Qingdao International Beer Town, Huiquan Plaza and Dengzhoulu beer street.

Qingdao International Beer Town

Located in the Shilaoren National Tourism Resort, Qingdao International Beer Town has been the main event place for the festival since it’s 6th season.

It is a top-grade amusement park with large theaters for the festival’s literary events, the Qingdao Beer Palace for tastings and contests and over 20 rides and activity centers.

Dengzhoulu Beer Street

Located beside the old Qingdao BeerFactory workshops, reconstructed Dengzhoulu is a bar street that features European style architecture. Tourists can find the freshest beer and all local snacks on this street.

More than 40 restaurants and bars line this 1,000-meter-long street. Among them are Beer House and Beer Palace, as well as some feature bars, like the noisy Oulala and the quiet Jingbar.

In addition to various sculptures of different brands of beer, beer bottles and even the dog Jiajia, the festival’s mascot, China’s first beer museum is also located on this street. Here tourists can the origin of beer, the long history of Qingdao beer and what a real beerhouse is like.

Huiquan Plaza

Qingdao is the sole partner city of Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. This fact is reflected in Huiquan Plaza’s theme sculpture that incorporates the five Olympic rings. During the Beer Festival the Olympic Sail Landscape Sculpture will be unveiled. It’s made from abandoned beer cans, which is a good illustration of the green Olympic concept.

Source: chinadaily.com.cn

Pilsener

Pilsener or pilsner is a pale lager, developed in the city of Plzeň (Pilsen in German/English), Western Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).

Origin

Until the 1840s, most Bohemian beers were top-fermented, dark and cloudy, although Bavarian brewers had begun experimenting through “lagering” beer in cool caves using bottom-fermenting yeasts, which improved the beer’s clarity, flavor, and shelf-life. Most of this research benefited from the knowledge already expounded on a book printed in 1794 (in German, 1801 in Czech) and written by famous Brno brewer František Ondřej Poupě.

The Mešťanský Pivovar (Burgess Brewery) recruited the Bavarian brewer Josef Groll (1813 – 1887) who, using new techniques and the newly available paler malts, created the first batch of modern pilsener on 5 October 1842. The combination of pale colour from the new malts (aided by Plzeň’s remarkably soft water), noble hops and Bavarian-style lagering produced a clear, golden beer which caused a sensation. Improving transport and communications also meant that this new beer was quickly available throughout Central Europe, and its style was soon widely imitated.

Modern pilseners

The invention of modern refrigeration by Carl von Linde removed the need for caves in which to store the beer, however even until recently the Pilsner Urquell brewery still fermented their beer using open barrels in the cellars underneath their brewery. This technology was changed in 1993 since large cylindrical tanks are used, however small samples are still brewed in a traditional way for the comparison of the taste. They also have the unique claim to being “the world’s first golden beer.”

A modern pilsener has a very light, clear color from pale to golden yellow, and a distinct hop aroma and flavor. Czech pilseners tend toward a lighter flavor with good examples being Pilsner Urquell and Staropramen, while those in a German style can be more bitter (particularly in the north, e.g. Jever) or even “earthy” in flavor. Distinctive examples of German pilseners are Flensburger, Beck’s, Konig, Radeberger, Veltins, Fürstenberg and Wernesgrüner. A popular Canadian Pilsner is LaBatt Blue.

Pilseners as a marketing category

While pilsener is best defined in terms of its characteristics and heritage, the term is also used by some brewers (particularly in North America) to indicate their “premium” beer, whether or not it has a particular hop character. It is generally regarded as being different from other pale lagers by a more prominent hop character, particularly from the use of Saaz (pronounced “Zaats”) noble hops.