Portal:Beer/Selected brewery/8
Tsingtao Brewery (Chinese: 青島啤酒; pinyin: Qīngdǎo píjiǔ) is China's largest brewery. Founded in 1903 by German settlers, it claims about 12% of domestic market share. The beer is produced in Qingdao in Shandong province, but the name of the beer uses the old École française d'Extrême-Orient transliteration. The beer's present-day logo displays an image of Zhan Qiao, a famous pier on Qingdao's southern shore.
The brewery was founded in 1903 as the Germania-Brauerei [Germania Brewery] to brew beer in the German tradition mainly for Germans and other Westerners in China. In 1915 the brewery was taken over from the German owners and managers and until 1945 was under Japanese management (the Japanese confiscated all German holdings in Shandong during World War I).
After the defeat of Japan in World War II the Qingdao Brewery was turned into a Chinese brewery under the supervision of the Nationalist government in Nanjing. However, this period of ownership only lasted until 1949 when the People's Republic of China was founded and the company became a state-owned enterprise.
The company was privatized in the early '90s and in 1993 merged with three other breweries in Qingdao and was finally renamed Tsingtao Brewery Company Limited. Today 27% of the company is owned by Anheuser-Busch. The company now owns several other breweries in China, some of which also produce Tsingtao Beer. (Full article...)