Holiday brew tasting

Happy hoppy holidays

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all you craft beer lovers out there! 2010 was a great year and I know 2011 will be even better.

That's some Ikea beer there in the pic. My girlfriend and I enjoyed this with our humble Christmas repast. I thought it was a decent, fresh, light-bodied amber ale or German alt (not too well schooled on my German beers though). Great pour, beautiful clarity; the only objectionable thing being a kind of metallic character mid-palate. It was a damn sight better than your usual JP 'Silver Bullet' type beer though, and what's more it was cheaper. Go Spendrups!

After the new year we went off to a quaint little hot spring inn on the lovely Izu Peninsula, in Shizuoka prefecture, just southwest of Tokyo. It wasn't easy to find any craft beer but we finally found these three guys.

Offerings from Usami Brewery (L, R) and Gotemba Kogen (M)

We decided to hold a little taste test with them.

Atsuko flying blind

We bought a can of Suntory Premium Malts (probably Japan's best macro) just as a control beer. Here are some thoughts.

The Usami beers had exactly the same labels. The most prominent thing on them were the proud words, "Izu's Local Beer". This told us a lot right from the start, namely that the style, ingredients, or heritage of the beer did not matter as much (or at all) as the fact that this beer was indeed...from Izu. These 'local beers' can be found all over the country in rural areas in fact, and range in quality from total crap to somewhat beer-like to OK-but-forgettable. They serve mainly as souvenirs for people traveling back from the countryside. These two beers were pretty good, however. Not outstanding, but surprisingly drinkable.

They were labeled on the caps as 'Czech type, Moruda' and 'German Type, Ra-in' respectively. (The second part of the name was rendered phonetically; I'm guessing 'ra-in' is 'Rhein' and 'moruda' is something Czech.) Not too helpful for the beer-curious, to be sure, but we could deduce that they were a German alt or smoked beer and a Czech pilsner by the appearance and flavor.

The pilsner was pale yellow with a very slight haze. It was fizzy, with a mildly earthy noble hop aroma. It was vaguely fruity sweet, with a slightly sour bite to it. I thought it may have been stored improperly. It was not all that memorable, but certainly not bad. I wouldn't say better than the Premium Malts though, if that tells you anything.

The smoked (we'll call it) was also slightly sour. It had a little malty, nutty nose going for it, as well as a nice malt-smoke balanced flavor, but too fizzy for me. Atsuko thought it had a candy-like sweetness. It was very clear and fresh tasting, a better drinking experience than the pilsner, but still not one that makes you say 'damn!'

The Gotemba Kogen was also a pilsner. It was pale yellow, just a bit darker than the Czech, but no haze. It was also fizzy. It had a bright, fresh, ever so slightly floral noble hop aroma, with just a slight sourness and extremely slight maltiness in the back of the palate. We both thought that it was good, but very generic and not even as good as the big commercial brand.

In all three descriptions the term 'slight' seems to sum it up. I'm sure they would be nice to drink on a hot day, but I doubt that they produce enough of an impact on the first-time drinker that he/she would remember to seek them out specifically again. In a word, they are forgettable.

It seems to be an unfortunate trend among small local breweries in Japan that they eschew trying to distinguish themselves with something other than their name on the label--like say by brewing with some unique local ingredient, or at least researching the style they are trying to brew, and providing some information about it to educate the curious drinker. They seem content with marketing their beer as merely another thing to bring back from 'Inaka-mura'. If they have any stylistic direction at all it seems that they just strive to make their beer as much like one of the big four (Kirin, Suntory, Asahi and Sapporo) as possible--that is bland, fizzy, and generic, and always served ice cold to mask the lack of complexity or flavor. As ironic as it disappointing.

What's not disappointing is that the overall craft beer industry here is slowly growing, that is, the good craft breweries, the ones with heart and soul and integrity. Hopefully the others will take note and start taking risks.

Next up: a report on the last brew of 2010 and the first brew of 2011. Keep you posted.