Pies and ales

It's not often the magic combination of pies and ales are combined together for one glorious event. Well, actually in Beijing it is once a year but what made this year different is that I was going - yay! There is a strong home brew scene in Beijing, mainly staffed by ex-pats. We have three (that I know of at least) small pro breweries which help support this. But the main thing is that good beer can be found! Held in a small traditional low rise building down one of the many long back alley's of Beijing it isn't the easiest to find. So imagine 4 of us walking there, one carrying a canister of CO2 to sell to the home brewers when a random English lad pops out of the crowd and asks if we knew if there was a bar in the area where he could get a beer. My lad your luck is in, just walk this way. He may have been wondering if we were about to lead him into a mugging or an early grave given the maze we entered but Mike our foremost beer sniffer led us straight through the door and into the promised land - pie and ale.

It was a reminder just how much the ex-pats in Beijing tend to congregate around the ex-pats - almost no locals could be seen. However, the pies were good and the beer strong so maybe we could leave learning the language for another night. Curiously we got talking to one group who asked what we did, turned out that they also work for Schlumberger in the office across town. Given we didn't even recognize them maybe, just maybe, our cross site interaction isn't quite what it should be.

If you plan to visit Beijing then you could do worse than target May (not too hot, not too cold) and google 'pies and ales Beijing' and look for a link like http://thehutong.com/pies-ales-on-the-terrace/