About Arrow Factory

In 2006, Will and his wife opened the Vineyard Cafe in a Beijing hutong called “Wu Dao Ying”, serving home cooked European food, wine and beer. There were not many beers available on the market, and where possible they sold UK ales and some of the USA craft beers that were becoming available, all in bottles. At some point within the next 5 years a friend asked Will if he had ever thought about making beer as “that will pay for your kid’s college education”. Will had not thought about making beer, and he had not thought about paying for a college education either, but his curiosity was sparked, and he started researching how to make beer. At the time, there was no retail outlets providing brewing equipment or brewing ingredients so it took some time to build a rudimentary system and track down malt and hops, but he eventually got to a point where he was able to make some beer. By this time Will had a craft sausage restaurant called Stuff’d, round the corner from the Vineyard Café, in a hutong called “Arrow Factory”, and in a small backroom he started making 140 litre batches that were fermented in white plastic buckets using fridges for temperature control, and then cold crashed in a walk in cold room. The beer was named after the street it was brewed in “Arrow Factory” which was so named as it was where examinees of the imperial exams would come shoot arrows in their downtime to let off steam. In late 2014 Arrow Factory, seeing the benefits in moving on from plastic buckets, installed a brewing system in “Charcoal”, with 12 1000 litre capacity fermenters. The previous brewing space was transformed into a hutong taproom bar, and Arrow Factory opened its first pub at Liang Ma River, serving a selection of its beers with British pub classics.