Tag - craft-beer

 
Menu
Search
 
May 05, 2024
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access

CRAFT BEER

Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH
May 6, 2017
Gold Master: Strong craft beer just in time for the heat
Whither craft beer? Possibly on convenience store shelves, though in small numbers.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Mar 17, 2017
Craft beer collaboration celebrates shared values of three very different businesses
A newspaper and a pub chain walk into a brewery...
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
Feb 1, 2017
Microbrewer in Tochigi targets niche market with craft beers
A businessman in Tochigi Prefecture is showing how anyone can enter the microbrewery market and make a wide variety of flavored beers in very small amounts, something made possible under tax law deregulation.
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 / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Dec 2, 2016
Ohka The Best Days: Craft beer and 'gyoza' keep Nakameguro's old spirit alive
It's getting hard to remember the days when "Nakame" — the local nickname for Naka-Meguro — was funky and alternative, before the river got cleaned up and gentrification set in. But there are still pockets of the old neighborhood vibe to be found if you wander far enough from the station; places like Ohka The Best Days.
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.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jun 4, 2016
Beer essentials: The craft beer boom in Japan shows no sign of running dry
Tomoko Sonoda was a college student during the "Dry Wars," the years immediately following the 1987 release of the game-changing light lager Asahi Super Dry. She and her classmates held tasting parties for the spate of new brews that were released by the three other major breweries in an attempt to compete. Together, they tried to discern the different flavors, but there wasn't much to discover. They were all more or less the same: drinkable light lagers, perfect for the Japanese beer market.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
May 20, 2016
Takadanobaba Taproom: Craft beer and deep-fried morsels with a Japanese accent
Great news for craft beer enthusiasts. Just in time for the summer heat, the good folks from Shizuoka's Baird Beer have opened their latest pub in the Takadanobaba neighborhood. It's their third Taproom in Tokyo, after Nakameguro and Harajuku, and sixth in Japan. It could well be the best of the lot so far.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Feb 5, 2016
Craft beer gets confrontational at the 2016 Japan Brewers Cup
Sake and whiskey might be the international pinups of the Japanese alcohol world, but beer is the local favorite. It is by far the most consumed alcoholic beverage in the country, making up 31 percent of all alcohol consumed yearly in Japan, according to a 2013 report by the National Tax Agency.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Feb 5, 2016
Craft Beer Market Koenji: A refuge for beer lovers with 30 local brews on tap
Sometimes you just want to hunker down somewhere simple. You're not looking for anything cutting-edge or fancy, just a place where the welcome is warm and the food is good, plentiful and satisfying — and ditto the beer. If you're anywhere near the Koenji neighborhood just west of Shinjuku, there is a high probability that Craft Beer Market is the kind of place that you're looking for.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / KANPAI CULTURE
Sep 11, 2015
Denmark's Mikkeller hits Tokyo, leaves strange brews
Mikkel Borg Bjergso, co-founder of the Danish microbrewery Mikkeller, is a man who likes a challenge. At the opening of the new Mikkeller bar in Shibuya, Bjergso tells me that his next goal is to finish the Berlin Marathon next September in two hours and 45 minutes.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH
Sep 11, 2015
Grand Kirin's new IPA is a reminder to put quality before convenience
It was fascinating to watch Japan's major breweries stumble over themselves as they tried to replicate craft beer — but the amusement is starting to wear off. Now, consumers are left with a lot of big-company brews on convenience-store shelves that are mediocre at best. Kirin has been particularly keen to tap into this market, with its Grand Kirin series, but these beers are some of the worst craft beer options on the convenience-store shelf. The new Izayoi no Tsuki Kiwi IPA (¥255) is a step up from the burned flavor of the previous variety, Galaxy Hop IPA, but ultimately tastes like a standard Kirin beer with an aftertaste of warm grape juice. Convenience and affordability are great, but this drink is a reminder that sometimes it's worth going out of your way (and out of pocket) to seek the good stuff.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / KONBINI WATCH
May 22, 2015
Only one of Suntory's two craft beer offerings manages to capture that small brewer vibe
Suntory's new Craft Select series isn't craft beer. It's not from a charming neighborhood brewery, but a beverage conglomerate that bought up Jim Beam.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
May 15, 2015
Spring Valley Brewery allows for a glance at its signature suds
When it comes to handing out this year's gongs and plaudits for the best setting and most notable architecture, there are going to be very few restaurants that will rival Spring Valley Brewery. That's because it occupies pride of place at Log Road Daikanyama.
With eye on China, defense chiefs agree to bolster interoperability
From left: U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Australian defense chief Richard Marles, Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara and Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro hold a joint news conference in Honolulu on Thursday.
Harajuku strives to reclaim its former glory — and surpass it
Laforet Harajuku, which celebrated its 45th anniversary last year, has been a witness to the district's evolution over the years.
Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ along with rivals China and Russia
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks in Syracuse, New York, on April 25.
Debate on constitutional revision at a standstill despite Kishida's pledges
With less than two months left before the conclusion of the current session of parliament, any possibility that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can deliver constitutional reform before the end of his term as Liberal Democratic Party president in late September, as he has promised, appears remote.
Japan's May 1 intervention may have cost ¥3.66 trillion, BOJ data suggests
An electronic screen displays a graph showing Japanese yen exchange rates surging against the dollar amid signs of intervention by authorities, in Tokyo on Thursday.
Kishida sets sights on energy and climate in South America trip
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will use a policy speech in Sao Paulo to set out his vision for ties between Japan and South America, almost 10 years after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe advocated for stronger ties between the two in the same city.
Yellow sand allergy: A health issue made worse by climate change
A screenshot of the Meteorological Agency's satellite image of clouds and yellow sand (in pink) on Sunday.
Climate change, chalky grains and the risks for Japan’s rice farmers
A farmer plants seedlings in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture. Japan’s self sufficiency rate for rice is nearly 100%, compared with 38% for food overall, on a calorie basis.
Japan wants you to spend more with ‘luxury tourism’
Performers play a traditional drum unique to Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, in the prefectural capital of Kanazawa on March 16 to mark the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen line to Tsuruga Station in Fukui Prefecture.

Podcast

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.
[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

Longform

Rows of irises resemble a rice field at the Peter Walker-designed Toyota Municipal Museum of Art.
The 'outsiders' creating some of Japan's greenest spaces
By Stephen Mansfield

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass
Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER