Milk Beer 奶啤酒 from China
This opaque white beer stood out clearly as the weirdest beer among the other normal beers at the cafe in my hotel in Beijing. The label in Chinese says 奶啤酒 (nai pi jiu), literally translated as "milk beer." It smells like sweet cream, and tastes a lot like the frosting I had on my last birthday cake. It tastes a bit like cream soda, but not quite as sweet. The best way I can hunk to describe it is whipped cream mixed with flat sprite. It's not bitter at all and if I didn't know, I probably wouldn't guess that it was beer at all. On that note though, it isn't a very strong beer, weighing in at only 3.5% when most flavored beers are more like 4.5%. According to the bottle it comes from Inner Mongolia, a part of china that also I home to an interesting style of milk tea. Thankfully, they taste nothing alike.
This is the first time I've seen or heard of milk beer, but it seems like a version called Bilk was developed in Japan two years ago to use up the excess milk supply in a small town. I decided to do more research about the milkbeer that I found:
This milk beer is made by a company called Health (汉奥斯), which says that this is the "First milk beer in China." It claims to be rich in nutrients like amino acids, calcium, vitamins, and trace elements. It has no preservatives, and seems to be healthy. I know beer and milk are both healthy, so why not combine them? I've heard of a lot of people mixing beer and milk, but it didn't seem like it turned out well.
According to Health's website, there is a long history of milk alcohol and milk wine in China, especially with the northern minorities. In the Western Han and Yuan Dynasties, supposedly it was pretty common for the people to mix milk and alcohol and have that as their main drink. Also according to the website, the company won an award for "Outstanding innovative Chinese beer." They produce 6 varieties of milk beer and milk alcohol.
ps.
Windows XP users: Can't see the Chinese characters? It's easy, just follow up to step 4 here: How to Install East Asian Languages
Anyone else seeing boxes instead of characters? Contact me in the comments. and I will help you out.