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By Greg Fountain In case this column doesn't make it immediately obvious, I might as well come right out and say it — I like beer. I'm partial to a Tsingtao, have experimented with Snow and can often be found supping from a cold can of Beijing's own Yanjing. But what I enjoy most is a nice, rounded craft beer — something with depth, flavor and tantalizing taste. In Yorkshire, we call such beverages "hand pull", because they're most often served by way of a beer engine — a manually operated device for pumping up the lustrous liquid from a cask in the pub's cellar. Strictly speaking, this would more correctly be termed cask-conditioned beer or "real ale", which similar to the United States-style craft beer that China is more familiar with, owes much of its popularity to a backlash against mass-produced lagers that began in the 1970s. Between 1978 and 2017, the number of breweries in the US rose from 42 to more than 2,750, with virtually all of that growth attributable to craft brewers. Over the same period, the number of "real ale" brewers in the UK rose to more than 700 four times what it had been in 1971. According to trade group the Brewers Association, the US craft beer market was worth $23.5 billion last year. Some predict that a similar craft beer explosion will soon hit China, which is why I read a recent Fortune article on the subject with great interest. | 
