*** Carl Setzer is the brewmaster and owner of Great Leap Brewery, or as it is better known to myself and probably a few other people in around town, Goddamn This Place Must Be Making a Killing. Great Leap makes their own beer. A lot of their own beer. Everyone who lives in Beijing sweeps pints and pints and pints of Great Leap beer off deep wooden surfaces from their main location, 12 Xinzhong Jie and also the (classic) Hutong one at 6 Doujiao pretty much all the time. From when they opened the No. 12 location on May 24, 2013, until December 23 of that year, they moved 100,000 liters — 227,272 glasses. Last week, Setzer lead me on a distillery tour of Great Leap, which was basically like the hardest chemistry class you’ve ever taken, delivered in a mad laboratory by Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart. After that, we sat down and did a long interview about the new Great Leap venue (breaking ground this month), the business of running the two current Great Leaps, his inspirations for creating his own beer, and his thoughts on the business of pulling taps in Beijing. Setzer is a passionate, patient, and driven guy. Thoughtful, confident, and ambitious. An unstoppable ratio. The man’s revolutionized his corner of Beijing, which elicits some respect and awe. Here’s the undercurrents of the biggest river of craft beer flowing through Beijing. Warning: He uses a delightful amount of adult language. ***

On the way to the US Embassy, inside the 3rd Ring Road. [No. 45-1 Xinyuanjie, Chaoyang District.]

It used to be a restaurant. Animal-themed. Maybe we’ll still keep a big stuffed bear at the front. [Ed’s Note: It looks like this. Before construction.]

I want to do the third one and leave it. But the people around me are like, “think about Shanghai”. But I don’t want it. There’s a reason why I live in Beijing.

Not a fan. It’s too… I lived in Taipei for a while and it reminds me of Taipei a bit. It’s green. But a lot of these places -- Singapore, Tokyo -- if you lift up the veneer of these places, there’s nothing there.

There’s no fucking veneer, that’s why I love it here. [Laughs.] It’s very, very veneer-less. I mean, you walk out and there’s six guys there drinking, one of them has his shirt pulled up, the other guy is taking a piss on your place…

I don’t have anything against the city, I just don’t think necessarily that Great Leap would fit there. You would never ask a brewery in Chicago to open a brew pub in L.A. You would never ask a brew pub in San Francisco to open in New York. It’s just not done. But in China, for some reason, it is. Everyone is always asking, “Well, when are you going to open in Shanghai?”, like it would be the same thing…

It would kill it. The business of craft brewing is such that… Well, for things like Blue Frog and Element Fresh, it’s fine -- these are big kitchens with a lot of SOP around everything [standard operating procedures]. But for craft brewing, it’s more involved and hands-on and it comes down to, do I really want my brand to suffer? Do I want to dilute my brand? I would rather it be known as a “Beijing place” -- Beijing beer -- and we do the beer festivals all year 'round anyways. Great Leap No. 6 back in the day Great Leap No. 6 after recent-ish renovations

The plan was always to do three. For craft beer, it’s harder to make work. It’s the layout of the bar and all sort of things. But even now with this place, we can’t keep up with the demand. This place, we can’t keep up. We get people coming in and there’s just no where to sit. They walk in and walk out.

I think Beijing is a beer city. I mean, Beijing’s got some great cocktail culture and nightlife clubs and shit, but for us, I think it’s just comes down to that we care. Like, we really, really care about our product and what we’re doing. Sometimes you go to other places and you don’t get the vibe that they really, really fucking care. They like the money and the like the attention. My wife and I left high paying jobs to do this -- my parents weren’t too jacked that I went though college, grad school, learned a language, had the job, and then walked away from it. And also we care about being in this city. Like, this place is packed, but it’s not just packed with expats. It’s packed with Chinese people. If you look at craft breweries, a lot of them, people will come in, drink a pint, have some food and leave, but we’ve got people who stay. We’ve got people who come back to try new things. Setzer droppin' science

So, this was a light brew week. Usually, we do six, seven batches the first week of the month and three the last. It gives the brewing staff a bit of a break, and allows us to work with high, high pressure and then take some time to just do it slow. But on the weeks with six or seven batches, I’m up at 4am and here at 4:30am. Mash in at 4:30am, and then done with that first batch at 11am. 20 minutes before that first batch is over, I do hot water, mash in a second batch. And so we alternate on that daily schedule as well. You don’t want to do a batch a day because it’s too stressful. We usually do a clean on Monday -- a brewery clean -- and then go 2, 2, 2, for the week and then a last batch on Friday at 1am, working around the schedule for when the bar is rammed. In order for us to work around for when the bar is busy, I got to be here at 4am and then be done with the brew at 5 or 5:15pm. And then I go home and see my son. He’s out of daycare at 4pm. I go home, hold him upside down, and twirl him all around. But, yeah, my son, he’s 3, he associates this place with dad. If I’m not home, I’m here. He comes in here on his way to daycare. But, yeah, when you’re in this business, you meet the restauranteurs in town, so you’ve got to go by and show face, so I do some of that sometimes. But then I’m in bed by 11pm or 11:30pm. I never got into the whole drinking coffee thing, so my internal clock is pretty easy to train on a schedule.

You have to. That’s when your pallet is peaked. We’re 100% on what’s coming out of the taps, so it’s during the process to make sure that we didn’t capture any off gases, mix any flavors wrong or anything. Great Leapers at the third anniversary Great Leap No. 12 during the early brewing hours

It’s the legalities of it. And what you have to do to make it work. It's just not at a place where I feel comfortable doing business. Well, years back, we had the pilot brewery and at that time, nobody had done it, and we were thinking, “fuck it, let’s go ahead and do it", and so we went to the health department, and this is what they told us: "there’s no law that says you can’t do it, but go ahead and do it, and we’ll get to you eventually.” All they were saying was: unless your working with us, either directly or you need us because you get in trouble, we’re not going to let you do it. So, we started anyways, and we sold 19 30-liter kegs at Patty O’Sheas -- Karl [Long, former manager at Patty's] was selling 22 kegs of Guinness at the time, I don’t know what they’re doing know -- but I had to walk in there with my hat in my had and say, “Karl, I can’t sell you any more beer." And I still get emotional about it because I let him down. Even though we didn’t really have contracts, but still. It was one of those things where it was so fucking close, but the reality of China came in.

Because I don’t want that on my books. Due diligence lawyers are so fucking proficient because it’s China and they're very good at finding corruption. You think I’d be able to hide that in my numbers that I’d paid a guy off? Even more, do you think the guy that I’d bribed would every let me out of his pocket? When you play it straight, it’s a lot harder, but this is the result. This can be the result. And now that we’re at this scale and legit, it’s a lot easier to deal with the health department. Because they can see that it’s real shit. They gave us a license at first like, “Okay, this is going to be closed in a month so, whatever, here you go”. THEN they saw that not only was it working but that now I’ve moved into a bigger space, and we collaborate very well with the health department. And that's part of it too. Setting the standard. Setting the bar for people to follow.

. Andreas Roehr can brew the fuck out of beer. His holiday beer is bar-none one of the best beers you can get in Beijing. It’s this Christmas beer. Gorgeous. It’s like 8% alcohol, beautiful spices, and my biggest complain is that he should be making this shit year round. But the owner of the brand is Bavarian and they don’t do that. They just do their three standards.

Well, Great Leap does the festival, and I always, always, always give the best location to the home brewers, because home brewing, even in the States, is pure heart. It’s passion. Great Leap's Beer Fest 2014 Making important declarations

Well, actually, the one thing you want to avoid when you’re brewing is that you don’t want everything to taste the same. You want to be able to close your eyes and taste the difference in a range. One of the best compliments I even got, VLB is this big brewing school in Berlin -- every two years they did this big brewing and brewing equipment expo in Beijing. And so they did a brewing seminar in Beijing -- it’s a school so they want to get people into their system -- and their entire senior teaching staff was brought to No. 6 by a close friend of mind.

Berlin. Very German. But not like Bavarian; sort of progressive about their brewing and ideas. But, like, you read about these guys in textbooks. Because they wrote the textbooks. Anyway, my friend from Taiwan who owns a bunch of breweries there bought them by, saying “Oh, he’s brewing on 200-liter stock pots and using honey and Sichuan peppers” -- these are what you call “wet dream beers”, like I’m the owner, so I can make them. You get a lot of capital with these sorts of beers with other brewers if they actually taste good. So, they brought these guys in, and they’re all these suits-and-ties Germans, and at the end of the night, the ties were off and the suits are in a pile in the corner, and everything they said was [effects a German accent], “the zing about your be-ar, none of them iz da same.” So, that’s the philosophy. Variety. Everything. Fuck, I’d have 36, 40 taps if I could. I’d kill my staff. I’d kill myself. If you go to a craft brewery and they’ve always got the same stuff on tap, you’re doing something wrong. Things can fall off and come back on but you have to keep moving. And we’ll be back up to 17, 18 beers next week. I’ve only got 14 beers on right now, and when I say that to people in the industry, they think I’m fucking crazy -- like, it’s too complex. The German guys, they’re too polite but I could tell they’re thinking, “Really? He’s got 15 beers on tap? Oh, maybe I’ll like 2 of them.” But my passion, my drive, it was to give Beijing everything they wanted. Before someone else came along to do it. I’m driven by this brewery that exists in my head. I keep seeing this bad-ass brewer, with great Chinese connections, and a dump truck of money that comes in a blows us out of the water. But it hadn’t happened yet. And it hasn’t happened. After No. 6 it hadn’t happened and so we do No. 12. And now we’re doing another one that’s bigger. With the new place the feng shui is perfect, it’s tucked in between two apartment complexes, it’s walking distance from everything. We have the mentality of, “Fuck that, let’s do it even bigger. Let’s do more.” Everyone copies what everyone else is doing, like if Paulaner has a 1000-liter brewhouse, oh, I want a 1000-liter brewhouse. It’s called proof of concept -- when something works, you just replicate it. But the next brewhouse we have is 1,200 liters. This is 1000 liters -- it’s not much of a jump -- but the new location, I want to show people that we can do more. It can work. We can do more... *** Great Leap's Banana Wheat -- looks pretty fine Here's the address info for the Great Leaps.