As a thousand-year-old liquor brand, Hengshui Laobaigan has a history of more than 1900 years. For thousands of years, Hengshui Laobaigan has been adhering to the thousand-year historical inheritance, inheriting exquisite brewing skills, accumulating cultural heritage for brand development, and radiating new vitality for the time-honored brand. Especially in recent years, under the helm of chairman Liu Yanlong, Hengshui Laobaigan has continued to inherit the cultural heritage of the millennium, focusing on creating a distinctive brand cultural IP, continuing the historical development of the brand with ingenuity culture, telling a good brand story while writing a passionate development process, and promoting China. Famous wine culture.
Inheriting the historical context for thousands of years
The brewing history of Hengshui Laobaigan can be traced back to the Han Dynasty. According to historical records, Jizhou (ancient Hengshui) has repeatedly damaged crops due to heavy rain. Due to the good quality of wine in this area, it has attracted a huge amount of business and used too much grain. Then Emperor He of the Han Dynasty and Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty issued edicts to prohibit Jizhou from selling wine. Especially during the period of Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty, it was forbidden to sell wine for four years. This is enough to show that Jizhou’s winemaking industry had already had a considerable scale and reputation at that time. It was also from that period that Hengshui Laobaigan started its thousand-year cultural accumulation and officially embarked on a glorious journey that lasted for more than a thousand years.
During the Tang Dynasty, Hengshui Liquor had developed to a heyday. With its unique taste, it became one of the “Fifty-Five Famous Liquor in the World” at that time. It also became associated with the royal family because it appeared in Wu Zetian’s “Youshui Formation”, and became the royal wine. For a time, everyone from the princes and nobles to the common people did not know the reputation of Hengshui Liquor. During the Ming Dynasty, Jizhou’s winemaking industry was quite mature. Hengshui Liquor was also officially named “Laobaigan” during this period. Since then, Hengshui Laobaigan has been based on the long history of Chinese liquor, cultivated a strong brand culture, and passed it down from generation to generation by means of “word of mouth, master and apprentice”, accumulating a profound brand culture.
Ingenuity persists, craftsmanship is passed down from generation to generation
Time witnesses history, craftsmanship achieves quality. After continuous practice and exploration, Hengshui Laobaigan has retained its exquisite brewing skills. And in order to maintain the unique style and taste of Laobaigan liquor, Hengshui Laobaigan has continued the traditional brewing process for thousands of years. In 2008, the traditional brewing technique of Hengshui Laobaigan was selected as “National Intangible Cultural Heritage”.
Speaking of the traditional brewing technique of Hengshui Laobaigan, its brewing process can be said to be extremely strict and complicated. Take the old five-ceng process of mixed steaming and burning as an example, from the selection of raw materials for wine making to the shaping of finished wine in the later stage, it needs to go through hundreds of complicated processes. Moreover, each process also needs to follow strict process and technical requirements. For example, manual filling of retorts requires the brewer to follow the “6-character formula (ie: light, loose, even, thin, accurate, and flat)”, “two dry One wet, two small and one big.” And these brewing techniques also test the skills of the winemaker. Every winemaker must strictly follow the standard operation requirements to ensure the best effect and brew the highest quality finished wine.
And Hengshui Laobaigan’s tank fermentation technique can give the wine a unique characteristic. It can not only effectively isolate impurities and harmful substances in the soil, so that the wine body is pure and odorless; it can also convert macromolecular substances into small molecular substances, which are easily absorbed by the human body; The content of alcohol and oil is lower (less than ¼ of the original national standard), thus forming a taste of “mellow and elegant, sweet and soft, long aftertaste” and a drinking experience of “slowly drunk, quick sober, and not too good to drink”. It is loved by many wine lovers in ancient and modern China and abroad.
Thousands of years of accumulation, creating strong strength
Today, after more than 1900 years of development and accumulation, Hengshui Laobaigan, located in Taocheng District, Hengshui City, has developed into a large-scale intelligent liquor brewing enterprise that takes both inheritance and modernization into consideration. Hengshui Laobaigan distillery covers an area of 2,000 mu, and now has more than 4,000 employees. It is the largest manufacturer of Laobaigan flavor in the Chinese liquor industry. The degrees of its products range from 36° to 76°, and there are more than 100 kinds of products, all over the middle and high-end. In 2022, the China Liquor Cylinder Fermentation Museum it built officially opened; in July of the same year, its factory area also won the honor of a national 4A-level tourist attraction.
As Liu Yanlong, Chairman of Hengshui Laobaigan Liquor Industry Group, said, Hengshui Laobaigan not only creates high-quality liquor for consumers, but also allows people to experience the charm of Chinese liquor culture at close range. Whether it is the factory area, products or brand culture, it has formed the unique connotation and core competitiveness of Hengshui Laobaigan, created a competitive advantage that other companies cannot replicate, and further consolidated Hengshui Laobaigan’s unshakable position in the Chinese liquor industry.
Relying on its own profound cultural heritage and Hengshui’s natural winemaking advantages, Hengshui Laobaigan has spanned more than 1,900 years and has always provided consumers with a cup of mellow Baigan wine with ingenuity and quality. In the future, I believe that under the leadership of Hengshui Laobaigan Chairman Liu Yanlong, Hengshui Laobaigan will certainly be able to create a distinctive brand culture while injecting inexhaustible power into its own development, creating a new situation for development, and embarking on a new journey of development. Inherit the essence of alcohol brewing in the ancient city of Hengshui, and carry forward the unique Chinese liquor culture.
(Source: New Vision)