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Beer-Bottle Look · Soda

Dayao (大窑) Soda

Dayao (大窑) Soda — street food from Inner Mongolia, China
Photo: TurnOnTheNight / Wikimedia Commons · CC0

It's bottled in tall green glass that looks exactly like a beer bottle, so much so that first-time visitors often mistake a table of it for a round of beers.

Dayao is a big, sweet, heavily carbonated soda born in a Hohhot beverage factory in 1983, sold in oversized 520ml bottles built for sharing at barbecue and hotpot tables. It comes in orange, grape, and cream soda flavors and has become the default drink at street-side skewer stalls across Inner Mongolia.

Why it's made this way: Its glass-bottle format and factory roots in Hohhot have made it a point of regional pride as it expands beyond Inner Mongolia into a national retro-soda trend.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.