Tag - neighborhood-hop-sports

 
 

NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS

Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Feb 24, 2017
Koenji's alehouses and brewpubs put the craft back in beer
Often touted as Tokyo's apex of cool, Koenji is a maze of narrow mixed-use streets, where the city's trendsetters, en route to hip cafes, cross paths with pensioners browsing cheap vegetables and various knickknacks.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Jan 27, 2017
Finding craft beer in the shadow of Tokyo's high-rise offices
For the first few days of each year, Tokyo is relatively quiet. Businesses are shuttered for the New Year's holiday, and many of the city's inhabitants retreat to family homes in the countryside to unwind with loved ones. Neighborhoods that are typically crowded with office workers, such as Yaesu, east of Tokyo Station, become ghost towns. However, it isn't long before workers return to their daily grinds — and watering holes. In Yaesu, bars are plentiful, including conventional standing bars and traditional izakaya taverns. But I'm not here for the conventional and traditional; I'm looking for Yaesu's best craft beer bars.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Dec 23, 2016
Sugar, spice and all things nice in Roppongi's craft beer bars
Depending on who you ask, Roppongi is either Tokyo's most sophisticated neighborhood or its seediest. Yet everyone can agree it's one of the city's most international. Each night, expats, emigres and immigrants wend their way through a landscape of restaurants, hostess bars, art galleries and nightclubs. Roppongi is a place of often garish contours and contrasts, its visible surface masking secrets at turns mundane and outlandish. There's a place here for anyone and everyone to while away the hours until dawn. And when it comes to craft beer bars, Roppongi does not run short.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Nov 25, 2016
A journey to the center of Tokyo's crowded craft beer scene
It may be located in the center of Tokyo but people always seem to be passing through Kanda on their way to someplace else: north to Akihabara, east to Asakusa, south to Tokyo Station or west to the Imperial Palace. This liminal neighborhood can feel like a no man's land of offices, banal apartments and elevated train tracks, but it is not without its charms. Off the street, many Tokyoites find refuge in its pachinko parlors, cramped izakaya taverns and, unexpectedly, craft beer bars.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Oct 21, 2016
Cozy bars and complex brews on Shibuya's busy backstreets
A short distance from Shibuya's madding crowds is Craftheads, a veteran bar in Tokyo's craft beer scene. I drift into this basement bar, grab a seat and reach for the menu before the masses arrive. I find a short roster of stalwart Japanese beers overshadowed by a catalog of American ales that are hard to find in Japan. The bottle menu in particular reads like a beer geek's Christmas list — including brews from Lost Abbey, The Bruery, Founders and AleSmith but, with prices exceeding ¥4,000, I opt for a more reasonable ¥1,200 bottle of Alpha King from Three Floyds in Indiana. This pale ale packs an initial punch with its caramel malts and grapefruit bitterness, but that soon gives way to a minty, astringent finish — delicious. Reaching the bottom of my bottle, I head for somewhere a little cozier.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Sep 23, 2016
Craft beer in Shinjuku: Finding gruit and gueze among the glitz and grime
Shinjuku is, in many ways, the center of Japan. It's the seat of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, home to the busiest train station in the world and has been immortalized countless times in film and literature. For many first-timers, a night in this frenetic Tokyo neighborhood means retracing Bill Murray's steps in "Lost in Translation" to drink at the Park Hyatt or exploring gritty microbars in the Golden Gai entertainment district. But in recent years options have expanded: drinking establishments are catering to a newer breed of drinker.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Jul 22, 2016
Heady craft beer in Tokyo's 'Little Paris'
French accordion music is floating out from lamp-post speakers as people crowd into the narrow strips of shade on either side of a street in Tokyo's Kagurazaka neighborhood. Long a cultural center, the gentle slope on which the neighborhood now stands once ended at the moat around Edo Castle. Kagurazaka is Tokyo's "Little Paris," with a high concentration of French restaurants, shops and expatriates.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NEIGHBORHOOD HOP SPORTS
Jun 24, 2016
Finding craft beer among the young tribes of Harajuku
Craft beer has come a long way in Tokyo. Twenty years ago, the market was mostly made up of generic lagers produced by major brewers such as Kirin and Asahi. Brewing laws prevented small players from entering the fray, and regulators were skeptical there would be a market for craft beer. Popeye, a bar in eastern Tokyo's Ryogoku neighborhood, was the first to prove them wrong when it began serving Echigo Beer in 1995. Following Popeye's lead, specialty bars began bubbling up all across the city, serving an ever-expanding array of ales and lagers concocted by small-scale breweries across the country and the world.

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