Photos: Tsingtao Brewery Museum

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As part of our foray into exploring Qingdao, we decided to check out the Tsingtao Brewery Museum. On a cold, rainy day, we figured the best thing to do would be to explore something indoors and we were a little curious as to how this would compare to other brewery tours we'd taken.

Entrance was 50RMB. Unfortunately, they don't take credit cards or bank cards unless you're buying more than one ticket. For your money, you get to check out two buildings worth of Tsingtao history, one small cup of raw beer, one small cup of draft beer (and by small, we mean really small: 0.125L small. For us, that's more like a beer shot), and a bag of preserved peanuts.

The two buildings are labeled A and B. A was more of a photographic history exhibit, named "The World of Tsingtao." In typical Chinese museum fashion, there were lots of lo-res photographs stamped onto walls and lots of mentions about how well the Five Year Plans cooked up by the National Congress worked.

B included a tour through the beer making process (which we admittedly rushed through since it's pretty much the same for every brewery), a corridor through which you could watch real workers working at the real factory, and the taste testing center. There were also some other random knick knacks: a optical illusion room with a beer shaped entrance, a bunch of Chinese rock sculptures (not of beer), and one kiosk that showed panoramas of "natural ecosystems."

Basically, the Brewery Museum is worth ticking off on your list of things to do in Qingdao, but we weren't incredibly impressed and we have no desire to go again. Our biggest regret though is not getting one of those 30RMB Tsingtao bottles with your face pasted on them - that souvenir was the most inspired thing in there.

Where:Tsingtao Brewery Museum, 56 DengZhou Rd, ShiBei District Qingdao
Phone: +86 (532) 8383-3437
Opening Hours: 8:30AM to 4:30PM
Admission: 50RMB