Tsingtao beer is certainly what made this town, and they are really proud of it. There is even a "Qingdao Beer Street" where you'll find, appropriately enough, the Tsingtao Beer Museum.
The name Tsingtao is an old Romanisation of the name of the town (the Germans called it Tsingtau). The correct modern spelling is Qingdao (which is a similar sound, to my ears at least). There have been several systems of transliteration of Chinese names throughout history, but it is now standardised in "pinyin" for Mandarin Chinese. So, just as we say Beijing where we used to say Peking, now we say and write Qingdao rather than Tsingtao. But the beer is a very successful brand name so it was kept.
The museum is on the site of the original brewery, established by Germans in 1903. It still operates as a brewery today but it is not their main production site. A word of advice if you visit: don't pay the extra for a "guide". The woman who led us around was perfectly polite (as are all Chinese people in the service sector -- except taxi drivers, but that's another story) and spoke English competently, if not perfectly. The problem was with the number of groups touring at the same time, each with a guide whose voice was amplified through a poor quality portable speaker. In one small room there could be three guides screeching their explanations to different groups, possibly in different languages. The result is that the guide wants to move fast, so you don't really get time to examine all the artifacts. There is sufficient English written on each display to manage without a guide.
There was, of course, a beer tasting. Two, in fact -- one of the "raw" beer before filtering, another of the refined product. A pleasant end to an interesting tour.
The name Tsingtao is an old Romanisation of the name of the town (the Germans called it Tsingtau). The correct modern spelling is Qingdao (which is a similar sound, to my ears at least). There have been several systems of transliteration of Chinese names throughout history, but it is now standardised in "pinyin" for Mandarin Chinese. So, just as we say Beijing where we used to say Peking, now we say and write Qingdao rather than Tsingtao. But the beer is a very successful brand name so it was kept.
The museum is on the site of the original brewery, established by Germans in 1903. It still operates as a brewery today but it is not their main production site. A word of advice if you visit: don't pay the extra for a "guide". The woman who led us around was perfectly polite (as are all Chinese people in the service sector -- except taxi drivers, but that's another story) and spoke English competently, if not perfectly. The problem was with the number of groups touring at the same time, each with a guide whose voice was amplified through a poor quality portable speaker. In one small room there could be three guides screeching their explanations to different groups, possibly in different languages. The result is that the guide wants to move fast, so you don't really get time to examine all the artifacts. There is sufficient English written on each display to manage without a guide.
There was, of course, a beer tasting. Two, in fact -- one of the "raw" beer before filtering, another of the refined product. A pleasant end to an interesting tour.
