Expanding Chinese Malt Industry

[charliep]

I don't mind Tsing tao beer. Does go good with Chinese food.

Off topic but asking the question about a customer makes me curious enough to go check their web site.

http://www.tsingtaobeer.com/home_lager.php

There is a demand for high quality malt barley.

Even more interesting is someone suggested to me that Anheuser Busch is building a brewery in China so they can sell Bud. Anheuser Busch has some of the toughest standards on malt barley and aging (ask Labatts some time). If Anheuser Busch build a brewery in China, where would they source their malt barley from? A tougher question - would they build the maltster in China or somewhere else (i.e. here)?

[charliep]

Checked the Anheuser Busch web to find the following quote.

Baker also provided highlights of the company’s international beer business, which is an increasingly significant contributor to Anheuser-Busch’s earnings growth. The majority of international beer profits are driven by the company’s 50 percent investment in Grupo Modelo, the leading brewer in Mexico and the brewer of Corona, the leading U.S. import brand. The company is also well established in China, the largest and fastest growing beer market in the world, and particularly well-positioned in the country’s most profitable beer segments. Budweiser is by far the leading super-premium brand in China and Anheuser-Busch has a 27 percent equity stake in Tsingtao, China’s leading premium brewer.

http://www.anheuser-busch.com/Press/InvestorGrowth_112907.html

[Burbert]

Hey Charlie P, remember when Molsons went South to Brazil to brew aaa Molsons, and lost all that money, cause apparently, the Brazys didn't like the brew. In fact Brazil countered with Brahma, exporting it to Kanadia, and guess what, people love it, trendy beer like it alot, and each bottle has 355 ml in it, just like a cann, good value. Take that Molsons! I guess my point is, maybe the Chinese won't like Busch beer, anything with the name BUSH on it right now, is not to popular. But I will admit that Busch sure has some great beer commercials ha, ha! The King of beers, I think knot............

[parsley]

This information was garnered from my maltster friend in Europe:

In a "normal" year,China imports around 1.2-1.4 million tonnes of malting barley.

Australia often supplies about 80%, although with crop failure in the last 2 years, they have not been able to send the usual volumes (over 1 million tonnes).

In these kind of years, Chinese buyers have been lookied in Canada and EU looking for additional quantity.

With price of malting barley rising significantly, the Chinese brewing companies have significantly reduced the malt content in their beers, using more local adjunct.

The most important requirement for beer sales in China is cost of product to market Raw material cost is critical.

On average, across the world, a brewery uses about 14kgs of malt per hectolitre of beer.

The Chinese have already moved down to 9kgs/hl, and will go down further if raw material costs remain at this high.
The Chinese are also growing more malting barley of their own.

One of the major regions that has been allocated land for malting barley is up in Mongolia. It works, but the logistics make it difficult. Mongolia is a long way from the main beer production regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Tsingtao, Guanzghou to Hong Kong (the affluent south east coast of China). The barley has to be moved a very long way.

Parsley