China's New Craft-Beer Bully

Ab Inbev, the Global Beer Giant That Owns Budweiser, Got Left Behind by the Craft Boom in America. Now It’s Using Its Muscle to Make Sure the Same Thing Doesn’t Happen in China.

- Scott Cendrowski

Jurinka and a partner own Slow Boat Brewery, a Beijing craft-beer maker that distributes its beers across a dozen cities in China and runs a new three-level brewpub in Beijing’s nightlife district. (Jurinka named the brewery after the 1940s Frank Loesser love song “On a Slow Boat to China.”) The business is driven in part by sales of kegs to restaurants and bars in China’s capital, where good beer isn’t as easy to find as it is in, say, Seattle or Kansas City.

One of those restaurants, a popular spot called Home Plate BBQ, once sold five Slow Boat drafts on its nine taps. Slow Boat sent a technician weekly to take care of the tap lines: “We bought them, installed them, and maintained them,” says Jurinka. But one day the tech was startled to find a device called a flow meter monitoring every line. Flow meters measure the beer passing through the taps, as a way for restaurants to track sales.

Home Plate itself hadn’t installed the meter: The global beer giant AB InBev had. The restaurant owners told Jurinka it was a free perk from the brewer of Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois. With one move, AB InBev had earned goodwill with the restaurant and got a source of intel on its competition—since the meter could monitor Slow Boat’s sales in real time. Jurinka, a broad-shouldered former U.S. Army sergeant, was incensed, he says, “but other than take our beer off tap, there was little I could do about it.”

Then last summer Home Plate hosted a four-day event for AB InBev—a Beijing unveiling for the craft brand Goose Island that included free beer and selfie opportunities with the goose mascot. China’s news sites covered the event like a fashion show. By autumn the restaurant had replaced all but one of Slow Boat’s taps. Now sitting atop Home Plate’s draft menu: three Goose Island beers.