Bottle. Dark brown, brown foam. Aroma: caramel and burnt malt, burnt crust of black bread, a little prunes. Taste: dense, caramel, sweetish, burnt, bread crust, a little dried fruit, winey, not bad at all.

Can. Brown, almost black, coffee foam. Aroma: sweet, caramel, a little burnt, a little coffee and something else. Taste: sweet, caramel, green apple, a little sourness and burnt crust, a little coffee drink, not the best, but quite drinkable.

At home, in Epalinges. Nothing special with this lager/pils, some malt, corny, watery some extract of hop, boring, 04.03.20, purchased at the Paris Chinatown, Paris.

Fun fact. I've had some really good hefeweizens from China - from both the national brewing school in Wuhan (absolute textbook example) and from German-run brewpubs in Beijing and Shanghai. Can Tsingtao do it, too?

This one has the dull appearance of oxidation issues, which quite frankly is beneath Tsingtao. Aroma is in the ballpark of sticky, banana-oriented hefeweizen. On the palate, okay, it's not that bad. It's way too sticky, but the banana esters are decent here, and the wheaty acidity is abundant, cutting through some of the stickiness. I can see what they are trying to accomplish. It's still too sticky for me, but I get it.

I can absolutely see drinking this out of one of those sidewalk tanks in Qingdao with a plate of clams.

Flip top bottle at the Blue Frog in Disney Town, Shanghai.
Pours clear amber with a small off-white head, some lacing. Caramel, malty, nutty, grainy, honey.

Dark brown body, medium head. Aroma has the dark sugars and intense fruitiness characteristic of foreign stout. Like caramelized blueberries, or roasted figs, the sort of estery notes you don't really get in any other style, except maybe the classic Polish Baltic Porters.

The palate has a really nice richness. There's more bitterness than I expected, but also toffee, fruitiness, and good body. This definitely seems modelled after the classics - FES, ABC Extra - and those have cut the alcohol by volume down in recent years, same as Tsingtao has reduced from 7.5% to 6.1%. There's a bit of roast in there, lots of sugars.

You have to really appreciate the tropical foreign stouts to like this one . That's some esoteric stuff, really, industrial stout from non-traditional nations, but I like it, and I like this.