Beer-Braised Duck 啤酒烧鸭
Beer-Braised Duck is featured among the local specialties of Jiangxi.
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Beer-Braised Duck (啤酒烧鸭) is a home-style dish of Nanchang (南昌), Jiangxi: duck chopped into pieces and braised in beer. Jiangxi's jxnews portal (大江网) calls it a well-known Nanchang home-style dish and traces it back to an older rice-wine braised duck (米酒烧鸭).
Where it comes from
Nanchang Release (南昌发布), the Nanchang municipal government's news account, explains the switch from rice wine to beer. Rice wine is a mainstay of Jiangxi braising: cooks add some when braising or stir-frying, or braise entirely in wine, to freshen the flavour, take away off-odours and add aroma. As rice wine was made less and less, and beer was easier to buy, beer took its place and beer duck came about.
In September 2018 the China Cuisine Association (中国烹饪协会) released its 'Chinese Cuisine' (中国菜) list of 340 classic dishes from 34 provincial-level regions. The dish is on it as one of Jiangxi's ten classic dishes, under the name Pijiu Shao Maya (啤酒烧麻鸭), 'beer-braised speckled duck'.
Flavour and texture
The duck comes out soft and tender, carrying both the savour of the duck itself and the light, clean fragrance of the beer.
How it is eaten
When the CCTV food-and-travel series Three Meals, Four Seasons (三餐四季) filmed in Nanchang in 2024, beer-braised old duck (啤酒烧老鸭) was one of the Jiangxi dishes whose making the crew recorded in detail. At the Jiangxi stir-fry (江西小炒) market during the 2025 China International Fair for Trade in Services (服贸会), a stall cooked Nanchang beer duck to order, and its cook told Beijing Daily that everything was stir-fried on the spot rather than pre-made.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.