On paper, people in Hong Kong don’t drink very much. According to the Department of Health, the average resident drinks just 2.83 litres of pure alcohol per year. That’s in comparison to 7.2 litres in Japan and 11.6 litres in the UK.

And yet this is a city awash with booze – and most of it is beer. That has been true from its very first days as a British colony, when local army men mixed porter with ginger beer to fight the summer heat. Military officials encouraged the consumption of beer as a way to keep troops from drinking the dangerously cheap local rice spirit, which left them blind drunk and prone to mayhem.

British beer historian Martyn Cornell, who lived in Hong Kong for several years, reports that trading company Jardine Matheson already had a warehouse full of beer by the time the Treaty of Nanjing was signed in 1842, giving Britain control over Hong Kong Island. By 1866, the colony was importing nearly 12,000 barrels of beer from the UK every year.

Back then, the most popular style of beer was porter, a dark brew made with chocolatey brown malt. By the end of the 19th century, though, Hong Kong was flooded with pale lagers imported from Denmark, Germany, the US and Japan. Walk into a local supermarket today and you might think that not much has changed: the shelves are still full of imported lagers. But Hong Kong has a long history of locally brewed beer, too.