A Polish founder, a Russian-built city and a line across Manchuria.

Harbin beer is named after the city that made it. In 1900, English Wikipedia says, citing Polish and English-language histories of the city, Jan Wróblewski, a Pole from Tarczyn, then in the Russian-ruled part of Poland, founded a brewery in Harbin, in what was then called Manchuria, and named it after himself. Chinese Wikipedia describes him as a Polish-born merchant who came from Russia and says the brewery began producing “Harbin Beer” that year. Its first customers, English Wikipedia says, were the Russians working on the railway across Manchuria, a project begun in 1898 that turned Harbin into a railway town. The historians Jeffrey Pilcher, Yu Wang and Yuebin Jackson Guo, writing in the journal Revista de Administração de Empresas in 2018, say that Russians set up China’s first breweries around 1900 in Harbin and Mukden, today’s Shenyang, to serve the railway.

The brewery changed hands, and names, as Manchuria did. In 1908 it was renamed Gloria; Chinese Wikipedia says it was taken over that year by a Russian operator. In 1932 it became the Harbin Brewery, run jointly by a Czech, Gavrilek, and a Chinese partner, Li Zhuchen, Chinese Wikipedia says. In 1937, during the Japanese occupation, a president of Dai Nippon Brewery joined its management and a second plant opened in Harbin’s Xiangfang district.

After the Soviet army entered Manchuria in 1945, the brewery came under Soviet control. Chinese Wikipedia says it was renamed the first brewery of a Soviet-run joint-stock company in 1946 and made beer under a “Red Star” brand. In 1950, English and Chinese Wikipedia agree, the Soviet side handed the brewery to the government of the new People’s Republic, which named it the Harbin Brewery and ran it as a state enterprise.

From state brewery to stock market to a takeover fight.

Under state ownership the brewery stayed a regional business. Both English and Chinese Wikipedia say that in 1959, during the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, it became the first Chinese brewery to brew with corn in place of rice. Pilcher, Wang and Guo note that in April 1958 China’s Ministry of Light Industry held a brewing conference at a model brewery near Harbin, a choice they read as a nod to the city’s place as the site of China’s first brewery, founded by Russians at a time when the Soviet Union was still an ally. They add that China’s later shift in attention from Harbin to Qingdao, home of Tsingtao, partly reflected the split between China and the Soviet Union in 1960.

The market reforms of the 1990s opened the company up. Chinese Wikipedia says that in 1996 the brewery formed a joint venture with a Hong Kong group, creating Harbin Brewery Co., and that between 1998 and 2002 it expanded across northeastern China, with breweries in cities including Jilin, Daqing, Jinzhou, Yanji and Shenyang, and in 2001 bought the northern brewing group of Canton Beer. In 2002 the company listed on the main board of the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Its listing made it a target. In June 2003, English Wikipedia says, SABMiller bought a 29.6% stake. In 2004 Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, won the company after a bidding contest with SABMiller; Chinese Wikipedia says the American brewer acquired 99.66% of the shares and took Harbin private. Harbin has belonged to the same group ever since, through the merger that created AB InBev in 2008.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from the Philippines and China: Zest-O, Tanduay, Ginebra San Miguel, Red Horse, Harbin, Snow and Yanjing. Philippine and Chinese drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a can, a name and the occasion it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A northeastern lager inside a global group.

Today the brewery is AB InBev Harbin Brewery, part of Budweiser Brewing Company APAC, the Asian arm of AB InBev, Chinese Wikipedia says. It puts the number of breweries at 13 and says the company moved its headquarters from Xiangfang to the Pingfang district of Harbin. The Harbin Beer Museum opened on 20 September 2014, after production moved to a new industrial district, Chinese Wikipedia says. It gives Harbin about two-thirds of the beer market in its home city and about 5% nationally, and says the beer is sold in every Chinese province except Tibet and in more than 30 countries and regions.

The brand’s line-up has grown around its name. English Wikipedia lists a Harbin Premium Lager and the regional Hapi and Golden Hapi beers, and notes that in North America the beer was first sold in Chinese supermarkets. Chinese Wikipedia lists versions including a wheat beer and a “1900 Classic,” and says some regional brands acquired along the way, such as Quanxue, kept their own names. Budweiser APAC calls Harbin “one of China’s oldest beer brands” and presents Harbin Icy, which it says uses a triple cold-brewing process; a zero-sugar Harbin Icy; and Harbin 1900, an all-malt lager that the company says celebrates Harbin as the birthplace of Chinese beer.

For a design guide, Harbin shows how a founding year and a city name can stand in for a whole brand story, even after more than a century of changes in ownership. Compare Tsingtao, the 1903 Qingdao brewery with German roots, and Snow, the Shenyang lager that grew into China’s biggest beer. For this guide we use a Harbin navy, an ice blue and a lager gold with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Harbin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.