Guangzhou Beer Festival 2007

I cant believe they have a beer festival every year in Guangzhou and I never even knew about it! I only found out about the weeklong celebration on Friday and it had already been going on the entire week. The Guangzhou Beer Festival also took place just down the road from where I live at the Tianhe Stadium. It was a huge carnival focused only on beer and food.

Each brand of beer had its own pavilion with tables, chairs, entertainment, and of course a bar serving chilled bottles and cans of their own beers. Some of the vendors present were Pearl River, San Miguel, Heineken, Tiger, Kirin, and even Budweiser. I had never been to a beer festival before so walking in there I nearly creamed my pants! It was like a huge convention for boozers and each booth featured loads of promo materials for their brand. You could literally walk around the place hopping from exhibit to exhibit sampling different types of beer. They were not stupid enough to make it free but all the beers were fairly priced between $1 and $3. I literally felt like a kid walking into Disney land when I got there running from stall to stall with a huge fucking smile on my face.

And where there is beer being promoted, there are sales promotion girls. You got to love SPG’s man. I so wish I could speak Mandarin when I come to events like this. There were so many hot Chinese women walking around selling beer, wearing clothes with logos of beer them. For a lush like my self you can only imagine the wild fantasies running through my mind at the time. I really am not a fan of Budweiser beer but I will admit that they had the hottest SPGs at the event and I have always found their promo uniform to be the sexiest.

The atmosphere at the festival was awesome. Everywhere you looked there were people walking around with beers in their hand, sitting in the pavilions singing boisterously, dancing, and playing games. It was an extremely hot night too so a lot of folk were roaming around bare chested. It was a perfect evening for cold beer. And with beer you need some good chow. Down the center aisle of the area there were at least 30 food vendors selling a variety of different foods. You got to check out the video clip. Dude, it seriously does not get much better than this. Looking at this now I wish I could go back in time! I am such a foodie.

After wandering around the grounds for a while we finally found a table and kicked back. Like I said, it was an unbelievably hot evening so we sat there picking on food and drinking cold beer for about 3-4 hours at least. We sampled pretty much every brand available, committing to nothing and trying everything we could. People were super friendly and many times we would be making GAMBEI and chilling out with total strangers. There were some games that people played on stage for prizes but most people just kicked back and had a good laugh. I cant begin to explain how friendly people were.

I am not really figuring out how events are promoted in this city and I very nearly missed the Guangzhou Beer Festival. That would have been a very sorry loss for me. This was one of the best nights I have had in long time. I think I spent the rest of the weekend sweating pure beer. There were mostly local people at the beer festival and surprisingly not many foreigners at all. I would have thought all the English teachers would be running out for $1 beers. I guess they did not know about it. But it was fantastic to see the people of this city letting their hair down and just having a good time and the fact that there were not too many foreigners there made the festival all the more charming. I cant wait until the next festival in 2008. You are all invited!!!