To hell with tea, China is a beer drinking country! You would never have guessed it from all the downright bad brands for sale at your corner yanzhidian (shop), but China is the world's largest market for beer by volume.

In fact, the best-selling beer in the world is one of China's most made fun of. Snow, which on numerous online beer forums has been compared to plain old water (hence its name), has dominated 5.4 percent of the global market share for seven years and counting.

Between the lousy lager and the undrinkable tap water, living in China can resemble a drought for foreigners. But just like in a drought, there comes a point when you'll drink anything.

Over the years that I have lived here, I've tried it all: Tsingtao, Yanjing, Harbin... The peculiar thing is, even though they are market competitors, every single Chinese beer tastes exactly the same: warm and watery with just a hint of hops.

We can blame zee Germans for this, who in 1903 anchored at the Qingdao coast, set up one of the country's first modern breweries, changed Q to a T and introduced locals to the underwhelming blandness of their future namesake pilsner. No one cared about the taste as long as it got them drunk, and since 4 percent is all it takes to put a Chinese drinker on the floor, nobody bothered adding more ABV (alcohol by volume).

Thankfully, in just the past year, microbrews have overtaken Shanghai like a strong stout, turning it into a new priority market for the global craft brew industry. The upcoming Shanghai Beer Week, for example, is expected to draw 80,000 participants, culminating in next week's Hongqiao Craft Beer Festival, where breweries from around the world will arrive to ply locals with their ingredient-rich ales and malts.

Chinese might be the world's biggest beer consumers, but leave it to the discerning palates of expats to pioneer the craft beer revolution in Shanghai.

In keeping with the international spirit of this city, the first brewery to do credible craft beer on a large scale was American-owned Boxing Cat, followed by the Canadians at Shanghai Brewery.

And yet, the proportion of Chinese craft beer drinkers has risen faster than the blush of an intoxicated local's face. Leon Mickelson of The Brew in Pudong says 40 percent of his clientele are Shanghainese - and they are more than willing to pay premium prices for a decent-tasting pint.

The range of beer in Shanghai has exploded like a fizzy can of Shancheng. From a Chinese prisoner's diet of watery lagers, we now have a devil's banquet of IPAs, stouts, pilsners, saisons and tripels flowing from local taps.

Brewmasters have gotten creative, too, incorporating Chinese ingredients into their microbrews, such as employing Sichuan peppers and infusing Yunnan tea into the ingredients.

Oddly, not everyone in Shanghai has caught on to craft beer. Go to most five-star hotels in town and your choices are limited to overpriced Heineken, Budweiser, Tsingtao and Stella Artois - the gang of four of the beer world. I can only assume that cheap brands mean bigger retail profits, or perhaps they are trying to push consumers to higher-margin wine lists.

However, the expansion of Shanghai's craft brew movement has been hindered by the lack of government support, which would allow local brewers to bottle their stuff and sell it across the country.

But that of course would mean cutting into the margins of the massive, State enterprise breweries like Snow, and you know that would go down about as smoothly as skunked Zhujiang.

Eighty percent of China's beer market is controlled by just five companies, and their sales have been hit by the country's anti-corruption campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, mainstream Chinese beer production fell 17 percent by the end of 2014. So it is only a matter of time (and maybe some help from the State) until we see Nanjing's Master Gao Craft on the shelves of Lianhua.