Copywriting & brand story
Writing beer identities, brand story + pillars, social and marketing strategy for China’s original craft beer brand.
Since the first time Great Leap messed about with hops, barley, yeast and water, we wanted to make a beer with Sichuan peppercorns. To mellow this mouth-tingling spice we add organic honey from the family apiary down in Shandong Province. Amber-gold, the beer starts out floral and smooth, and finishes fresh and crisp as a Great Wall sunrise. Our best seller and proudest creation, it’s the beer we started Great Leap Brewing to make.
What makes a man? Is it doing the right thing, whatever the cost? Sure, that and kidnapping Chiang Kai-Shek. This beer is a tribute to Zhang Xue Liang, the ‘Little General’ who forced a union between the KMT and the Red Army against the Japanese. After 50 years of house arrest, Zhang was proclaimed a patriotic hero by both Taiwan and Mainland China. Strong, unyielding, with a dash of bitterness. Little General IPA. The stuff of heroes.
Welcome to China. Welcome to Beijing. And welcome to Doujiao Hutong Number 6. These were the epochal words of old Zhang, the day he accepted Great Leap into his historic family home. Pale Ale #6 is the first beer we brewed on the site, named in eponymous tribute to each dusty brick and timber beam. This brew represents all that we’re about: a no nonsense session ale that goes down easy, fusing brewing styles from Britain, Belgium and the USA.
Great Leap Brewing was born out of love.
Two people from different worlds who together, hand in hand, took a leap into the unknown.
Before 2010, beer in Beijing was something weak and watery that you drank with food. Great Leap Brewing changed all that. It wasn’t easy. The system was stacked against small brewers like us. But our determination paid off. Laws were changed in our name, paving the way for China’s beer revolution.
Courage, resilience, passion, and hard graft. These are the qualities that have defined our journey to make China’s best beer since we started brewing out of a tiny courtyard lost in the maze of Beijing’s old alleyways.
Today, even though we distribute dozens of beer styles all over China, we never forget our roots, our profound love of great beer, and the community that nurtured us into being.
That’s why we vow to always stay fiercely independent, to keep pushing boundaries while ignoring trends, to do the right thing by our customers and the environment, and be meaningfully Chinese in everything we do.
At Great Leap Brewing, we know from experience that, in people as in beer, one size never fits all. What makes us different is what makes life interesting, and that is something worth fighting for.
