When President Xi Jinping and the British Prime Minister David Cameron downed a pint of beer at a pub in England in October, the beer in question immediately became a must have for hundreds of thousands of drinkers in China.

Not only that, but the pub where the two leaders drank, The Plough at Cadsden, in Buckinghamshire, became a must see for Chinese on the tourist trail, almost as compelling a stop-off point as Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London.

The continued sales prospects in China of the beer the two leaders drank on that occasion, Greene King IPA, are unclear, but one thing is certain: The taste for craft beers like it that have taken hold in China in the past few years shows no signs of abating.

That success is all the more remarkable given that wine and Western spirits, even for the astonishing sales figures routinely trumpeted about them, have taken some years to turn into anything like staples of Chinese drinking, while craft beers have been an overnight sensation.

The country is awash with beers, most of which are mass-produced industrial ones. More than 47 billion liters of beer were produced last year, more than in any other country, said the National Bureau of Statistics of China.

But there has been a change in beer preferences, with young, trendy consumers switching from dominant mass-produced industrial beers to imports and local craft beers.

At the Fourth Beijing Craft Beer Festival held from June 10 to 11, which organizers say drew at least 8,000 visitors, a beer aficionado from Tianjin said: “China has so many beer brands like Tsingtao, Yanjing, Zhujiang, Snow and Harbin, but essentially they taste very much the same. But beer can have very different tastes. That is why I love trying craft beers the fact that you can experience so many different tastes.”

Since 2012, imports of foreign beer in China have risen 737 percent, and at the same time many local craft beers have emerged.

Gao Yan, 48, who styles himself Master Gao, having obtained a master’s degree in chemistry in the United States in the 1990s, is the founder of Master Gao Brewing Company of Nanjing.