The prevailing narrative holds that beer was introduced to China in the nineteenth century, when Chinese travelers first encountered it abroad. This paper challenges that narrative by tracing earlier cross-cultural encounters recorded in thirteenth-century travelogues. Missionaries who visited China during that period described locally brewed beverages made from rice or millet, which they referred to as beer. Although these drinks differed significantly from the barley- or oat-based beers of Europe, the missionaries applied a familiar term to categorize an analogous fermented beverage. Such linguistic and cultural conflations persisted even after European beer began to circulate in East Asia in the seventeenth century, when Dutch colonists described shaoxingjiu as Chinese beer based on perceived similarities according to what would today be considered industrial standards. These historical cases reveal the global character of beer as a non-distilled, cereal-based alcohol that emerged independently in multiple regions. The recognition of local variants through global interactions fostered both mutual understanding and the coexistence of material diversity. Beer, as a medium of global exchange, exemplifies how convergence in form does not necessarily imply uniformity in historical trajectories.