Shangri-La Beer

The Shangri-la Highland Craft Brewery, which is also called Shangri-la Beer, is China's first fully licensed craft brewing company. The company is based in Shangri-La City, in northwestern Yunnan province, China, which is located in the Dêqên Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

With the support of the government, Shangri-La City's first beer brewery was founded in 2009 by Songtsen Gyalzur. The initial investment was expanded in 2013, and formal production began in June 2015. The brewery was established in an intact cultural and natural environment in cooperation with Swiss and German beer experts. In order to meet the annual needs of China's growing domestic craft beer market, the brewery management decided to expand the production line and began building a new brewery in Shangri-La Industrial Park in 2013. The Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery aspires to quality by applying the German beer brewing purity laws or Reinheitsgebot, in order to maintain high quality requirements.

Shangri-La Beer's CEO, Songtsen Gyalzur, was born and raised in Switzerland. His mother was an orphan who moved to Germany and began her studies after her adoption by a young German doctor couple. At the age of 36, she finally had to chance to return to her hometown in Tibet, and established its first orphanage "Tendol Gyalzur Children's Charity". Since then, she has been caring for many children in need of assistance. Seeing his mother's hard work and persistence, Songtsen Gyalzur opted to give up his real estate company in Switzerland and returned home to Shangri-La City to assist his mother with the orphanage. Using his business experience, he started a business in his hometown Shangri-La City in order to support his mother's project and solve the employment issue of the young people who grew up at the orphanage. Songtsen Gyalzur established the Shangri-La Highland Craft Brewery, which not only solves the problem of unemployment among the young people from the orphanage, but also supports local agricultural development. 80% of the brewery's employees are the people who were raised at the orphanage. Part of the company's proceeds are donated to the orphanages' daily operations, and a highland barley planting base of 583000 square meters was established locally.