Master brewer and founder of RichKat Craft Brewing Gavin Hemple is growing the brand’s Hong Kong operations
90 locations of any restaurant brand in Hong Kong indicates long-standing customer loyalty and reliance, brand familiarity, and an understanding landlord. Across the border in Shenzhen, that is the norm.
The mega-city has double the population and area size over Hong Kong and, predictably, hosts a wealth of homegrown food, drinks, and hospitality brands catering to its 18.5 million residents.
Those in dire need of whetting the palate with craft beer, a new-ish phenomenon in a country with affinity towards pale lagers Tsingtao, Harbin, and Snow Beer, have flocked to RichKat Craft Brewing in Shenzhen with its near-centurion count of funky taprooms and another 100 across southern China.
Born in 2017, Richkat Craft Brewing is the brainchild of founder and master craft brewer Gavin Hemple, a British home-brewing hobbyist whose China journey began in 1998 with his studies in traditional Chinese medicine and Hong Kong story in 2004 with a career in hotels.
Since his youth in Leicester, he had always been a fond pub-lover. “The UK has always had a strong traditional regional microbrewery scene, now reframed as craft beer. You travel to a new city and you can taste what the local beer is. In China in the early 2000s, you could try the local beer and it tasted the same as every other beer,” Gavin shares.
The mid-2010s inspired China’s craft beer brewers to import American craft beer know-how with a local spin to their beer. In 2014, Gavin, with years exploring Hong Kong’s burgeoning craft beer scene and success in a local homebrew competition, purchased equipment to start homebrewing and “the rest was history.”
Beginning with RichKat’s first store in Shenzhen’s Futian district in 2017, Gavin’s philosophy is one of hoppy egalitarianism. “[Craft] beer should always be a democratic product, an affordable luxury for everyone.”
“Most pubs in the UK are generally catered to one specific type of demographic or age and that’s just sad. As long as you are above the legal drinking age, you should be able to feel comfortable and welcome at a [RichKat taproom].”
RichKat grew its count of taprooms to two dozen by early 2021 and now 190 today. Their taprooms in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and across southern China are marked with shiny storefronts, polished wooden seating, and a healthy range of IPAs, stouts, lagers, ales, fruity goses, and wheat beers.
In 2024, RichKat moved across the border with locations in Sheung Wan and Soho at the behest of their day-tripper Hong Kong customers visiting their Shenzhen properties and wishing for local love. Today, they are joined by taprooms at Causeway Bay, Shek Tong Tsui, Kwun Tong, and Go Park Sai Sha.
With the 50-plus store count of Hong Kong’s pub chain Bar Pacific, it is rare for bars or pubs to increase in number beyond a second location faraway from their headquarters. Gavin’s democraticising in RichKat means every neighbourhood thirsty for craft beer, salty bar snacks, and pizza can earn this potential privilege of access.
On the RichKat tap list, 11 craft beers are available in light, fruity, hoppy, and dark categories, including a hawthorn kolsch, grape gose, lychee oolong sour ale, season hazy IPA, and dry Irish stout.
RichKat’s canned and tap crafted beers are made at their brewing headquarters in Foshan with ingredients sourced across the mainland. “The most important thing is having a broad cross-section.”
Gavin is seeking to attract the drinker not fixated on drinking pints of Guinness or Heineken for the last thirty years, but a crowd of pubgoers who are more experimental and swayed by new flavours of beer, such as chenpi white tea lager and watermelon & strawberry gose, two creations born in China but flowing down to their Hong Kong taprooms.
“At any taproom or craft beer pub, you need to have beer-flavoured beers, IPAs, creative fun stuff, and dark stuff high in strength, not just 25 different IPAs, a wheat beer, lager, and one stout.”
Under Gavin’s spell, RichKat has seen success in bringing a proven Shenzhen brand and prices back to Hong Kong. Most RichKat locations offer HKD99 two-hour free flow deals during happy hour periods on weeknights and weekends. Tap pours begin at HKD72 with cans priced starting HKD32.
“ We have not closed anywhere yet [in Hong Kong], so that’s a success! We’ve been here for two years, that’s good. People said at our prices we wouldn’t survive, but we have.” Gavin plans to grow to 10 locations this year.
“We are representing our home city of Shenzhen wherever we expand and our business grows. Our goal one day would be people coming to South China saying ‘we must go to RichKat’.”
Visit RichKat in their six locations across Hong Kong for a taste of Chinese-made craft beer.
