MaovemBEERS Brings Together Breweries, Books for Good Cause

Beer bars and craft breweries in five Chinese cities including Beijing will join together on Friday, November 4, for Super Beers for Books, also known as MaovemBEERS, to raise money for this year's designated Maovember charities, GoodWorks Coffee and The Library Project.

Beijing's Arrow Factory, Dirty Duck Pub, Great Leap Brewing, Panda Brew, and Slow Boat Brewery are all participating, along with Boxing Cat Brewery in Shanghai, Myth Monkey in Wuhu, Shangri-La Beer in Yunnan, and WE Brewery in Tianjin. Full details on each outlet's level of participation is here, so please check before heading out to support education and reading by drinking beer.

Maovember is a month-long charity campaign that teams restaurants, bars, shops, and customers in China for good causes. The name is a play on the mao, a coin worth one tenth of a yuan (USD 0.015), and Maovember, a global health campaign that sees men grow mustaches. The theme is small businesses and small donations can yield big results. Maovember backs projects that produce visible results.

This year's campaign supports The Library Project, which builds and stocks libraries in underfunded schools in rural China; and GoodWorks, which trains developmentally-challenged, late-teen orphans for jobs in the coffee trade. Beers for Books are occasional events where a venue gives a set amount of money per beer sold, usually to Room to Read or, in China, to The Library Project.

"This event was a long time coming. I helped organize the first Beers for Books here in 2012 with Vedett, Beijing Beatles, and The Local (then called Brussels) and two more at Great Leap Brewing. But I'd talked with Library Project's Tom Stader many times about doing a Super Beers for Books with multiple venues, and now that Maovember has two education-focused charities, including GoodWorks, the timing is ideal. And with craft brew partners in Kunming, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Wuhu, this also fits into one of our goals this year to expand beyond Beijing," Maovember organizer Jim Boyce said.

As of writing, Maovember had raised almost RMB 30,000 during this year's event.

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Email: stevenschwankert@thebeijinger.com
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Photo courtesy of Maovember (from last year's Maovember at Migas event)