A Drink With Gordon McMeekin, Brewer at Wangjing’s Hisewel Brew-pub

Tracy Wang, Senior Editor | Jun 20, 2018 4:00 pm | Add a comment | 2373 reads

A Drink With is a regular column in which we ask amazing Beijing personalities to tell us about their drinking habits and liquid preferences. This issue we speak to Gordon McMeekin, who started as a homebrewer, before landing jobs as a brewer at several breweries around China. He most recently worked with Wangjing’s newest brewpub, Hisewel.

READ: Wangjing's New Hisewel Brew-pub & Kitchen Is Worth the Long Commute

Could you tell us a bit about yourself, what brought you here and what was that like?

Scottish, 5’9”, currently sporting a straggly ginger beard. I first came to Beijing to study for a year in ‘93, came back a couple of times for flying visits, then arrived last summer to make beer here ... the Northern Capital has changed a bit!

Who would you most like to go out drinking with?

Well, aside from just having a few drinks with a general assortment of convivial ne’er do wells, reprobates, and barflies my impossible evening would be with my father – who is now pushing up daisies – my brother, a few of the really good friends I’ve met at different stages of life and who are from all parts of the globe and would never otherwise meet. Throw in Dean Martin, Jim Morrison, John Wayne, Richard Burton, Marlene Dietrich, Flann O’Brien, and John Bonham, and it would undoubtedly be an interesting evening.

How old were you when you started drinking?

I started drinking about 15, brewing often rough but drinkable beer with my brother and friends in our little village on the Argyll coast of Scotland – you made your own fun there. Tell us about the first time you were drunk. Oh dear, that was bad, I still shudder a bit at the thought. I was still about 15, a few friends and I got a helpful fella to buy us a takeaway of beers and a bottle of vodka from the Sundowner bar in Dunoon. Then we went back to our den by the river and drank it all by a bonfire. I burnt my eyebrows off lighting the fire after my ‘friend’ poured a load of petrol on it when I wasn’t looking. We all got staggering drunk, I went home with my friend to stay the night and as we got to his house his parents came back from the pub. We tried to pretend we weren’t drunk and his mother went to the kitchen and prepared the post-pub fry-up. She put down a groaning plate of fried food for my friend’s dad and asked if I wanted some. It was an instant “Can I do you a fry-up Go--?” accented with projectile vomit through my fingers as I ran, hands clasped to mouth, heading for the toilet. Cleaning up was not fun either.

What’s your favorite drink? Has it changed over time?

I went through a long cider phase. If you travel around the southwest of England it’s difficult not to get a taste for good cider. I flit between bourbon and Scotch for hard liquor. Peaty Islay malts have been winning out for the last few years – a gorgeous tipple. But really, I’m a brewer and beer drinker, so it has to be beer and the clear winner is green-hopped Kentish cask ale. It’s made with the freshest hops pulled off the vines at the optimum moment in the autumn, and brewers have them in the kettle the same day. In the hands of those wizards the result is sublime; gentle but distinctive fresh hop notes meld smoothly with a light malt background. Hand-pumped, it only lasts a few weeks and is best savored at a pub beer garden table on a sunny Kentish autumn evening – perfection.

What’s your most outrageous drinking experience?

Jeez, I’m drinking as I answer these questions, should I really be honest about this? There have been a few but keeping things local: I ruined my chances of a diplomatic career by standing with my trousers round my ankles to illustrate an anecdote after helping myself to lots of free booze at the British Embassy Christmas party when I studied in Beijing back in the early ‘90s.

Which is the favorite of your beers, and what makes it special?

Right now it’s my West Coast IPA. I love the way those folk over in the western states of the US have made a style of their own; you couldn’t have drunk beer like that 20 years ago. An American sense of adventure and exploration with fantastic new hops, sitting wonderfully on a complementary malt base – it’s a modern classic. I’ve tried to honor that with my West Coast IPA; new recipe, new brew wkit. It’s good and I enjoy every pint but I want it to be better, and it will be.