13. December 2023

This EWO promotional calendar from our collection tells the story of a beer once brewed in China & exported around the world incl to India. Yet it also contains a touch of false advertising which tragically leads us to one of the most sardonic murder cases of Old Shanghai.

26. September 2023

In celebration of the 188th Oktoberfest, here's the 1937 Munich Beer trademark registration certificate of the EWO Brewery in Shanghai, China. From the MOFBA collection. More on the Shanghai EWO Brewery in our previous post here.

06. December 2021

For almost 30 years the local Shanghai beer market was dominated by the omnipresent U.B. (友啤) beer brand. Its original creator was the Shanghai Union-Brauerei AG, incorporated 1912 by the German company Schwarzkopf & Co from Tsingtau (now Qingdao). After the Great War in 1918 a previously minor Norwegian shareholder, Mr. Frithjof Hoehnke, took over the business and renamed it to Aktieselskabet Union Bryggeri or Scandinavian Brewery Co. Ltd in English. In 1931 the company was once more...

02. June 2021

Our friends at Historic Shanghai are organizing a Historic Beer & Buildings Walk (gulp!) on June 20th: https://www.historic-shanghai.com/events/. So here's an original EWO beer crate to get you in the mood

29. April 2021

Jardine Matheson aka "EWO" Building completed on the Bund in 1922. As one of the first foreign businesses to set up branches in Shanghai in early 1843 it established The EWO Brewery Ltd. in 1935. Jardine was not only the oldest but also the largest "Hong" or Yanghang (洋行) - foreign owned trading houses concerned with trade with China, which later became huge diversified conglomerates. The name EWO stems from the Cantonese pronunciation of Jardines Chinese "Hong name" 怡和洋行, meaning...

28. December 2020

If in the mid 1930s you had asked any old Shanghailander, sailor or random tourist visitor about Shanghai's most prominent beer brand, all three of them would have undoubtedly agreed on U.B. Beer. The German, then later Scandinavian brewery dominated the local scene for close to 30 years. Only in 1936 when British Jardine Matheson launched their EWO brand, the beer market heated up and the long-held no 1 spot of U.B. became seriously contested.