Terroir in barrels
The award-winning beer draws its soul from the folds of Guizhou's mountains and rivers. Its inspiration began with a cycling trip.
Alongside the wild strawberries of the Wumeng Mountains, Zhang encountered another ingredient in the Beipan River valley: aging fragrant apricot trees growing freely in the countryside.
Though long past their peak, the untended trees still produced thick-skinned apricots bursting with aroma.
Zhang has long been fascinated by this kind of wildness. "Sourness is wild," he says. "Things that aren't grown for yield often carry richer aromas."
The brewing team gathered the wild strawberries and apricots and placed them into aged oak barrels. Drawing inspiration from Guizhou's traditional fermented sour soup, they introduced Brettanomyces yeast to drive the fermentation.
The beer then rested quietly in oak for three years before undergoing another six months of bottle aging.
To collect wild yeast, the team once traveled across the forests of Maolan National Nature Reserve in southern Guizhou and the peaks of Leigong Mountain. But the most complex yeast strain they discovered came from an unexpected place: the center of Guiyang, right beside the brewery's own kitchen.
"It's not necessarily true that the farther you are from people, the better the environment," Zhang says. "From our experience in Guizhou, the wild yeast we can collect in the city center is no worse than what we find in the wilderness."
The result of this meticulous approach is a beer layered with bright wild strawberry aromas and mellow apricot notes, supported by oak-derived hints of clove, leather and smoke.
The story of TripSmith itself is rooted in the idea of movement and creation.
After returning to his hometown in 2011, Zhang decided to build a craft brewery based on local culture and ingredients. "I realized that an industry can only become truly distinctive when it creates original products using local culture and local raw materials," he says.
Guizhou's fermentation heritage convinced him it was the right place to try. The province produces some of China's finest baijiu and chili sauces — proof, he believes, of its natural fermentation potential.
From the beginning, TripSmith aimed to bring global brewing knowledge back to Guizhou and blend it with local ingredients.
Today, the brand has grown from a small shop in a narrow alley into a brewery with an annual production capacity of 2,000 metric tons. Its beers are now sold in more than 200 cities across China, with markets outside Guizhou accounting for roughly 80 percent of sales.
