Qingdao Beer Museum 青岛啤酒博物馆

About Qingdao Beer Museum

It reuses early buildings of the Tsingtao brewery.

The industrial architecture is therefore part of the subject of the museum itself. Brewing history and the surviving factory setting are the two connected reasons to visit.

The museum stands on the site of the former Germanic Beer Company's Qingdao joint-stock enterprise (日尔曼啤酒公司青岛股份公司), predecessor of the Qingdao Brewery (青岛啤酒厂), which German and British merchants of the Anglo-German Brewery Company founded on 15 August 1903 at Muller Captain Street (穆勒上尉街), now Dengzhou Road (登州路) 56. It was China's first continuously operating brewery, designed for an annual capacity of 2,000 tonnes and among Asia's largest and most advanced breweries at the time. The Qingdao Brewery began planning the museum in 2002, and it opened on 15 August 2003, the brewery's hundredth anniversary, reusing the old German buildings and early equipment as an industrial tourism site.

The Qingdao Brewery's original buildings, in the German Jugendstil style, stand as two red-brick structures flanking the factory's south gate. The western building combined offices with a recreation area and, at the time, housing for foreign senior managers, built with granite foundations, exposed red-brick walls and red-tile roofs. The eastern building held the brewing offices and production workshop, equipped entirely with machinery imported from Germany.

The museum is built on the Nationally Protected Heritage Site (国家重点文物保护单位) formed by the Qingdao Brewery's early buildings (青岛啤酒厂早期建筑), and it is itself rated a national 4A tourist attraction (国家4A级旅游景区), a National First-Grade Museum (国家一级博物馆), and a national industrial and agricultural tourism demonstration site.

What to look for

• Early brewery buildings form part of the museum’s subject.
• Brewing-history displays connect the industrial architecture with the city’s beer-making tradition.

The surrounding area

Coastal city base; Badaguan and the wider Laoshan area are separate outings.

Location & getting there

Getting to Qingdao Beer Museum

Approach the former brewery buildings on Dengzhou Road in Qingdao’s Shibei district.

• Confirm the visitor entrance and access to the named areas before departure.