The fourth Beijing Craft Beer Festival held from June 10 to 11, which drew nearly 8,000 visitors.

When he tried to sell his first batches of hoppy bitter barley brown ale and IPA (which stands for India pale ale), in Nanjing in 2008, he said, it was like “crying out in the desert” because nobody in China had a clue what craft beer was.

This year he forecasts he will sell 1 million bottles of Baby IPA and 2 million bottles of Jasmine Tea Lager, his two flagship bottled craft beers, among more than 20 brews under his Master Gao brand.

One of Gao’s earliest efforts to proselytise in China on craft beer involved a book he wrote and that was published in 2011, Get Your Own Brew, in which he details the beer making process and offers advice on how to evaluate beer, the first of its kind in Chinese.

“There has been a craft beer movement in China since 2010,” said Gao, who now enjoys a reputation in the industry of something like the father of craft beers in China.

These days small-scale pubs are popping up all over the place selling imported and local craft beers.

“In Chengdu alone, more than 300 pubs were selling foreign bottled beer last year,” Gao said. Reflecting the helter-skelter nature of the industry right now, he added soberly: “However, I reckon only half of them have survived.”

The fact remains, too, that despite the frenetic growth in the industry, craft beer sales in China account for less than 1 percent of the total beer market, industry experts say.

Li Wei, president of the Beijing Home Brewing Society, said: “Even though a lot of pubs have beers on tap and myriad new pubs have emerged, if you really count things, there are only six serious local craft beer players in Beijing. By serious I mean a craft brewery having its own complete branding output, and I am talking about Jing-A, Great Leap, Slow Boat, NBeer, Panda and Arrow Factory.

“As far as I know, there are no statistics, either from government or market research firms, on this fledging industry. It is hard even to get a handle on how much craft beer the country produces.” However, he guesses that China produces about 100,000 tons of craft beers in a year.

Gao and a group of craft beer industry figures in China are in the process of setting up an industry body, the Craft Beer Association of China, to promote and protect the interests of Chinese craft brewers and craft beers. Plans for the association have been on the drawing board since October, Gao said.

One of the craft breweries that has made a mark in Beijing, Jing-A Brewing Co, founded in 2012, is the idea of two North Americans, Kristian Li and Alex Acker, who first did home brewing as a hobby while holding down jobs in Beijing.

“China is really at the beginning of a craft beer revolution,” Acker said. “What is happening in China right now is probably what happened in the US 20 years ago when the beer landscape was mostly about industrial and commercial beers (as is the case in China with beers like Tsingtao, Snow and Yanjing). The movement in China is part of a global craft beer movement. After having been around for quite a long time in the US and Europe, China is the next frontier in craft beer.

“Apart from Beijing and Shanghai, we have been looking at Chengdu, Tianjin, Suzhou, Wuhan, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The movement is growing.”