It makes and sells a variety of beers at those locations, popular both within the city's Western expatriate community and youth Chinese drinkers interested in alternative products.

[2] Founder Carl Setzer along with Dane Vanden Berg, another American expatriate working for an information technology company in Beijing at the time, were frustrated by the narrow choice of beers available in the city.

With Liu Fang, Setzer's Chinese wife, they first began brewing in a former siheyuan on a hutong in the city's Nanluoguxiang neighborhood.

[3] Eventually, it expanded to two other locations and began offering a range of up to 40 beers at different times of year, with an infusion of venture capital.

[4] There he met and befriended Liu Fang, a Shandong native,[7] before returning to the U.S. for graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh, after which he went to work in Taiwan.

Setzer, who had not been much of a drinker until the previous year[4] due to a family history of alcoholism and a religious education,[6] was disappointed with China's national beer brands like Tsingtao.

The couple traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands, where visits to local breweries helped Liu realize that all beer did not have to taste the same.

Back in China, Setzer, whose German great-grandfather had worked at a brewery in Frankfurt, began learning how to make beer,[10] while Vanden Berg, in California, raised money from investors.

In Beijing itself, there had been some brewpubs and German-style beer halls operated by Munich-based Paulaner Brewery since the early 1990s that catered both to expatriates and to Chinese made prosperous by free-market economic reforms that began at the time.

They began remodeling the turn-of-the-century library, part of a Qing dynasty mansion,[13] for use as a brewpub, keeping the decor to a minimum in order to concentrate on the beer and send that same message to customers.

'you need to be young to ride a stout and strong horse and make big leaps'), but nonetheless evoking the courage the founders displayed in starting it.

[7] He hosted a party at the siheyuan, inviting a fellow American attending the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study, at Tsinghua University, whom he had shown the beer to as he brewed it, to come down and try it.

In his blog for The Atlantic, where he had often complained about the poor quality of beer in not just China but Asia as a whole, he promised readers he would be on the next flight back to Beijing to try some of Great Leap's offerings.

So if they can come in and see that one of our beers is named after a character of the Three Kingdoms, or has spices or a style of tea that they drank when they were kids, it's easier for them, just out of curiosity to pick that one.

She observed that, among younger Chinese, the longstanding tradition of consuming alcoholic beverages only in the form of grain-based spirits with meals seemed to be changing thanks to the introduction of beers like Great Leap's.

[9] Setzer continued to expand the available beers, introducing a new one each month on a seasonal basis, and making it a permanent offering if it did well, like a chocolate cardamom stout.

"[17] At the other end of the scale was his Little General IPA, a beer in a style Setzer had not originally planned to make but produced in response to customers' demand for one.

[9] The company collaborated with Boxing Cat, a Shanghai craft brewery, to produce Yunnan Amber Ale, which tops off the three different malt and hops varieties each it uses with dianhong black tea from the titular province.

The oldest, the company's original location, is on Doujiao Hutong in the Dongcheng District near the Bell and Drum Tower and south of the Nanluoguxiang neighborhood.

It is a renovated siheyuan, or courtyard house, built to serve as a private library[13] during the final years of the Qing dynasty at the beginning of the 20th century.

[31] It was Great Leap's first location to have a full-service kitchen, serving cheeseburgers, sandwiches and salads in addition to a fuller array of bar snacks.

The Sanlitun brewpub, close to the U.S. embassy in the Chaoyang District, is at 530 square metres (5,700 sq ft) the largest such facility in mainland China.

[34] It has three 2,500-liter (660 U.S. gal) fermentation tanks, producing Great Leap's three best-selling brands: Honey Ma, Pale #6 and Banana Wheat[30] (others are also on tap.

[30] A fourth Great Leap location, GLB LIDO - a thirty tap taproom - opened December 2018 at the Nuo Center, Jingtai Road, Chaoyang.

In June 2019, Great Leap began production at its brand new 500,000hL per annum capacity brewery in the Xiqing Development Zone, Tianjin.

Great Leap's product range includes 40 beers, of which 12 are on tap in its facilities at any given time, with many varieties produced on a seasonal or rotating basis.

[36] Since the company's name also alludes to the Great Leap Forward, an ill-fated economic development program launched by Mao Zedong in the mid-20th century,[5] it drew on that period of modern Chinese history as inspiration for part of its logo.