Hopfenstube

Nice atmosphere, inobtrusive music, friendly and attentive service (English spoken), OK food, crappy but expensive beer.

Typical Asian-German style mall-side beer hall. Lots of shiny copper, around a billion seats. 3 regular German style beers and seasonal. all pretty good. Attentive service, of course. Not unique, but worth a stop.

Passed by and dropped in for a quick beer. Decent place, but nothing special. Has some ok beer, at least ok for being China. Quite expensive but if you are thirsty and happen to go by it could be worse.

Um, you have to go during the weekend happy hours, which are 6-9 Friday and Saturday at time of entering this rating. Check their website before going! The Fri/Sat happy hour is the best time to go because of the "all you can drink" special on all the house beers. Otherwise the beers are crazy expensive. They have happy hours on most days of the week, but only for one beer at a time (such as 2 for 1 lager). So on the Friday and Sat is the best value for trying all the beers. It’s still 108 RMB (about $35) per person for the all you can drink, so you really need to be thirsty. Basically you need to drink 3 masses each to make it worthwhile. But it’s a fun experience, the service is good and when it’s just before 9PM all the customers quickly order a bunch of beers to pile up on the table to squeeze the "all you can drink" special, which is fair, and the staff don’t mind at all. So I give them a thumbs up for that, even though otherwise it’s one of those typically tedious giant corporate Asian brewpubs with overpriced German-style beers and terrible menu. They do have a pleasant outdoor patio. If you go during regular times hope you have an expense account.

Big corporate German brewhouse in a big corporate mall/office building, in the big corporate part of Chaoyang, which is the big, corporate part of Beijing. So you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. The beer seems good, but it is very expensive. Between 6:30-9:00 each day they have different happy hour specials, and at their prices you pretty much need that. Nothing much to say about the vibe, it’s not that interesting and it’s the same thing you see all over Asia. But the beers are nice and it’s close to the subway.