This Monday, Beer Matters successfully completed the inaugural edition of The Craft Beer General Course by Beer Matters in Shanghai.

For us, this was more than the end of a three-day program. It was the completion of something we have wanted to build for a long time: a course that does not treat craft beer as a collection of isolated topics, but as a complete system of history, flavor, technique, business, culture, branding, and innovation.

The course has been reviewed and approved by the BJCP Education & Training Directorate, and that matters to us. But just as importantly, this first edition confirmed something we have long believed: China’s craft beer industry does not only need more specialists. It also needs more people who can see the whole picture.

That is why we built this as a general course.

In today’s craft beer world, people often work in separate professional languages. Brewers think in fermentation, process, and quality control. Founders think in survival, positioning, and strategy. Bar owners think in list design, service, and customer experience. Buyers think in sell-through and portfolio balance. Media professionals think in storytelling, communication, and culture. Enthusiasts may know flavor very well, but not necessarily the structural forces behind what they drink.

Each of these perspectives is valuable. But if they remain disconnected, the industry remains fragmented.

A general course creates something different. It puts people from different backgrounds into the same room and helps them build a shared vocabulary. It allows a brewer to better understand the market, a marketer to better understand the product, a bar owner to better understand style logic, and an enthusiast to better understand the forces that shaped the beer in their glass. In that sense, this course was not only about education. It was also about translation — across roles, across disciplines, and across the many internal boundaries of the craft beer industry.

That idea was reflected in the first cohort itself. Participants came from across China and represented a remarkably broad mix of backgrounds: brewery founders, brewers, R&D leaders, product managers, craft beer bar owners, non-craft bar operators, buyers, suppliers, media professionals, and serious enthusiasts. This diversity was not incidental. It was essential to what the course is trying to do.

Over three intensive days, we built the course in layers.

We began with beer history, starting not from modern craft beer, but from the deep roots of fermentation itself. From prehistoric fermented beverages to medieval brewing systems, from the rise of hops to pale malt technology and lager yeast, we traced how beer became what it is today. But this was never intended as history for history’s sake. The purpose was to understand why styles emerge, why they survive, and why they change. We used history as a way to reconnect ingredients, technology, institutions, commerce, culture, and taste.

From there, we turned toward China’s beer landscape and business models. We looked at how beer developed in the Chinese context, how industrial lager shaped the market, how craft beer entered that landscape, and how different types of breweries and brands now position themselves. For many participants, this was one of the most useful parts of the course, because it connected beer not only to brewing, but to market structure, business reality, and strategic choices.

We then moved into tasting foundations and sensory methodology. This part of the course focused on how to taste beer systematically, how to describe it clearly, and how to move beyond vague preferences into more structured judgment. We also introduced Beer Matters’ own framework for flavor description, designed to help participants think not only about flavor notes, but also about intensity and balance. For many people in the room, this was where scattered impressions began to become usable language.

One of the most anticipated parts of the program was off-flavor training. In this inaugural edition, participants trained with 13 off-flavor kits, giving them the opportunity to experience these aroma and flavor faults directly rather than only reading about them in abstract terms. It is one thing to recognize “diacetyl” or “oxidation” as words, and another thing entirely to build real sensory memory around them. For brewers, this is quality control. For judges, it is calibration. For bar owners, buyers, and communicators, it is a sharper ability to identify what is actually happening in the glass.

The second day focused heavily on World Beer Styles. This was not simply a tasting day, but a full-day effort to build a mental map of beer styles through both logic and sensory experience. Across the program, participants studied 99 beer styles, covering the full set of BJCP beer styles relevant to exam study, while also working through 35 benchmark beers selected to make style families, regional traditions, flavor structures, and stylistic boundaries more tangible. The goal was not rote memorization. The goal was to understand how styles relate to one another, how geography and culture shaped them, and how to remember them through structure rather than fragments.

The third day, designed for the full program cohort, moved further into industry application.

We introduced a simulated judging table, where participants practiced scoring beer using BJCP scoresheets. For many of them, this was the first time they had worked through the actual structure of competition evaluation: identifying strengths and weaknesses, understanding style fit, and learning how judges translate sensory impressions into scores and written feedback. This shift in perspective was especially valuable for brewery owners and technical teams, because it allowed them to look at beer not only as makers, but also as evaluators.

From there, we moved into competition strategy. We examined the logic behind major beer competitions, the importance of entering the right categories, the common mistakes made in submission and description, and the strategic decisions that can influence whether a strong beer is recognized. Good beer matters, of course — but in competition, good beer alone is not enough. Understanding the system matters too.

The program then shifted into brand positioning, content, and marketing. Using a structured brand framework, we worked through how breweries and beer businesses can define what they are really offering, how they differentiate themselves, and how they connect product truth with market communication. We also looked at real-world content and copywriting cases, diagnosing common problems in beer marketing and exploring how technical language can be translated into messages that are both accurate and commercially effective.

Finally, we arrived at one of the most important themes for the future: Chinese craft beer innovation.

This part of the course was especially meaningful because we did not approach innovation as novelty for novelty’s sake. Instead, we asked what it would mean to build innovation with real cultural depth and real product logic. We discussed local ingredients, tea, fermentation traditions, and broader Chinese flavor resources, but also the discipline required to avoid superficial “ingredient stacking.” The goal was not simply to add more things to beer. The goal was to discover deeper relationships between ingredient, style, story, and drinkability — to find forms of innovation that are rooted, coherent, and worth repeating.

Taken together, these modules formed the logic of the course: beer history, China’s beer landscape, tasting foundations, sensory training, off-flavor calibration, world beer styles, judging practice, competition strategy, brand thinking, content and marketing, and Chinese craft beer innovation

That is what we mean by a general course.

Not a casual tasting event.

Not a narrow technical seminar.

Not a branding workshop in isolation.

Not a style class disconnected from business reality.

But a serious, structured attempt to reconnect the many languages of beer.

We are proud that the first edition has now been completed. We are even prouder of the people who joined it with seriousness, curiosity, and openness. Their participation made the course stronger, because the course itself depends on exchange. A general course only works when different people bring different angles into the same space.

This first edition also gave us something equally important: proof of concept. It showed that this kind of education is not only possible in China, but urgently needed. It showed that there is real demand for deeper, broader, and more integrated beer education — education that respects both sensory rigor and market reality, both technical knowledge and cultural meaning.

And this is only the beginning.

Following the inaugural edition in Shanghai, we will continue taking The Craft Beer General Course by Beer Matters to more cities across China as a recurring touring program. The next stop will be Beijing, where the course will be held alongside the Beijing Craft Beer Festival, widely described as the largest craft beer festival in Asia. For anyone considering a visit to China, this is an especially exciting moment to come: a chance to taste some of the best beers being brewed in China today, while also seeing how a new generation of serious beer education is taking shape here.

We would like to thank everyone who joined the inaugural cohort, as well as all the partners and supporters who helped make it possible.

See you in Beijing!