Beer Drinking In Japan

(Written in April, 1997)

I just got back from a week of software testing (which paid for the ticket and most of the hotels), playing music, sightseeing, and drinking beer in Japan.

The good news is that beer in Japan is good, cheap, and very available. The Japanese passions for hospitality, space-saving, comfort, food, and automation mean that there is one drink-vending machine for every 25 Japanese. In a central city, there will be several on a block. This means a small food-vendor can cook a specialty food and not worry about having to stock drinks. It also means that someone who wants to be polite and hospitable can buy you a drink without taking you anywhere special that you wouldn't be going anyway. The machines stock both hot and cold beverages -- they will typically include hot and cold coffee with and without milk and sugar, hot and cold green and black tea, fruit juice, and soda as well as beer. (They don't all have beer; the ones in the workplace didn't, but on a downtown street I don't think you would have to walk more than a block to find one that does have beer. In hotels, every floor has one with beer next to the ice machine.)

There doesn't seem to be any special licensing necessary to sell beer; every sit-down restaurant I saw had it; and the ones I was taken to by Japanese people all seemed to have one kind on draft and the other kinds in bottles. In general, all the draft beer was good; the bottles are the same there as they are here.

On my departure, I discovered that one reason for the consistency of the head on the draft beer was another example of Japanese automation -- they have a draft beer pouring machine that automatically moves the tap to keep it just under the surface of the poured beer. After this is adjusted when a new keg is installed (by pouring out a couple of pitchers of foam), they trust even Business-class passengers to operate this machine.

It surprised the Japanese I talked to when I told them (on the authority of a Zymurgy interview with a Japanese home-brew store owner) that home brewing is now legal; there's still the same impression there is in Germany that beer is something that is mass-produced in a large factory with millions of dollars of equipment by brewers with academic credentials. The style is North-European Pilsener; I never saw anything Japanese that wasn't by the big three producers (Kirin, Asahi, and Sapporo).

They are importing foreign beers in a variety of styles, but I didn't see any Japanese actually drinking any of the imports. The group of musicians I spent a couple of evenings with went out after the music for food and beer, and drank the draft, even in the "Bierkeller" restaurant which had a pretty wide variety of imports in cans and bottles. The ex-Londoner I met in the "Pig and Whistle Pub" in downtown Osaka advised me against the draft Guiness, on the grounds that it's shipped surface and doesn't survive the trip, so we drank the draft Japanese.

The big three breweries are all starting to produce a "Dark" of some kind. These are available in liquor stores, and one was in the Business-class lounge at Kansai Airport, but I never saw one in a vending machine. I tried all three. I liked the Asahi "Munich-type black" the best. The Kirin Black was also a plausible imitation of a Munich dark, a little sweeter than the Asahi. The Sapporo "Drafty Black" was half the price of the other two. The can said, "Richly aromatic flavor/The right ingredients for more affordable drinking pleasure". It had a slightly sour flavor and a bit of roast character. Guiness doesn't have anything to worry about, but it's a pleasantly drinkable beer.

It seems to be routine in Japan that people who have been working together go out to eat and drink together afterwards. The groups I drank with all included at least one person who had decided not to drink, and the menus frequently had several sizes of draft to accomodate people who like to drink but not very much. As far as I could tell (my Japanese is rudimentary; some of the people I was with spoke English well, but certainly weren't translating everything that was going on), nobody made an issue of how much or little anyone was drinking.

There is now at least one major beer-drinking festival -- at the peak of cherry-blossom time (which I missed by about a week in Osaka and probably 2 weeks in Hiroshima) all the best sites for cherry-blossom viewing are paved with groups of people celebrating with kegs and bottles of beer.

All the food specialties seem to go quite well with the beer. Japanese hospitality provides you with large amounts of good food but doesn't insist on filling you up so much that you can't top off with another draft at the end of the meal.

In summary, Japan is where the US was about 20 years ago in terms of diversity of beer-drinking experience, a great deal ahead in terms of quality and consistency of service, and several light-years ahead of where we are now in terms of availability. If you're looking for a beer-drinking culture to visit, Japan is one of the real possibilities.

Kampai!

Last modified: 2002-06-29 11:12, 2007
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