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.

16. November 2023

For for information on Old Shanghai's largest & longest-standing beer brand please visit our previous blog post here.

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.

22. August 2023

You’ve surely heard of Laurel & Hardy, the famous slapstick comedy duo of early American cinema. But did you know that China had its equivalent with Langen Han & Xiucen Yin? A 1940 hand fan advertisement for Shanghai U.B. Beer from our collection reminds us of their forgotten history.

15. February 2023

This marvelous commemorative booklet from our collection was published on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the celebrated Shanghai Union Brewery. It offers an intriguing testament to Shanghai’s world-famous history of commerce, design, architecture and… tragedy.

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

09. May 2021

Commemorative retro-style beer can: The Tsingtao Brewery was founded on August 15, 1903 as the Germania-Brauerei (Germania Brewery) by Bavarian settlers in Qingdao. From 1898 to 1913 the port city of Qingdao in Shandong province was a German colonial concession.

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.