Saturday, August 18, 2012

Nemesis Beer and the Japanese Craft Scene


There are two ways to understand Japanese beer. If you go to Japan and ask 99.99% of Japanese citizens, they will only be able to tell only tell you about one kind of beer: the mass produced tasteless swill that most people drink. The other kind of beer is Japan’s craft beer movement, which sadly only has a small following in Japan. Most people in the world and, yes, most people in Japan, don’t know that Japan is one of the highest beer producers in the world when it comes to the number of beers produced. No other Asian nation – and very few European nations ­­–­ produce the same amount of beers as Japan’s craft beer movement.

In my time in Japan, I searched high and low in each restaurant and pub to find a beer that wasn’t one of the 10 mass-produced pale lagers. Eventually, I found small shops and dark corners in Kyoto that sold a few. Over the course of two years, I tracked down about 120 Japanese beers and am only now realising that there are over 3,000. In my last days there, I visited a Japanese beer museum that was assembled by one Japanese man over the course of just 4-5 years. It proves that Japan is a brewing nation. 

What is really interesting is what they brew. Unlike the UK, where even the smallest brewery has some level of distribution in place, most Japanese beers come from small microbreweries that usually only sell to locals while 99% of the market is dominated by 10 beers. By locals, I mean that one or two places may sell the beer occasionally; otherwise the beer is either consumed by the brewer or sold to the happy few that live near the brewery. And since Japan doesn’t have a history of beer, their definition of brewing is really different and experimental.  Each and every Japanese craft beer could be in a style common to any brewing country, from Australian Lagers to Russian Stouts. There are some truly horrible green tea beers and some truly marvellous Imperial Chocolate Stouts. Although the UK has a long history of brewing, it doesn’t have the variety and randomness of drinking a Japanese craft beer, which could taste like almost anything.

I currently review the beers that I have drunk on ratebeer.com, which is – I think – the largest beer database on the Internet and have over 700 reviews at present. I have added many English and Japanese beers as well as a few others to their database, and was occasionally among the first to review them. Such a pleasure is generally rare however as the database is rather substantial. Most beers I come across have usually been rated by more than a handful of people, with general amount of reviews for most beers being between 200 and 5,000. So, outside of Japan, I usually expect the beer I drink to be already in the database.  Most beers that can be found internationally are listed on ratebeer.com.

However, I recently came across a strange anomaly. I visited Japan again this summer and found myself in a quieter area of Kyoto where I came across a small liquor shop. I popped inside, as I usually do, to see if it had anything interesting. Now, by this point, I knew most of the foreign beers that I was likely to find after my time in Japan, but I was surprised to find a new one. In this little quiet sake shop that sold the 10 Japanese common lagers as well as the 10 common international lagers like Budweiser and Heineken, I found a bottle of Samichlaus Classic Malt Liquor, 14%, from Austria. I thought it would be interesting to try it since I’ve never had a malt liquor before, but I was appalled at the charge of £7.50. In my mind, a malt liquor was a beer-type product somehow lower in quality and cheaper to make than a simple pale lager. I believed malt liquor to be the cheapest kind of beer available and therefore generally used for those who are financially limited but still want to get drunk. It certainly wasn’t something I was willing to pay £7.50 for and so the beer was discarded.

Boy was I shocked when I found it in Lancaster, examining the beer fridge at the Sun Hotel. I had never seen this beer before, I found it for the second time in two weeks and it had only been rated 8 times on Ratebeer. How could this unpopular, most likely poor quality beer find itself across the planet in the most random of places? I knew that this time, regardless of the cost, I needed to taste it and see what it was. To my surprise I was charged the same £7.50.

Pouring the beer, I truly expected it to be horrid. How could it possibly be good with the image that malt liquor has? Now, I would like to think I have an idea what good beer tastes like and this beer was incredible: one of the best beers I have ever had. It was a complex German lager. This beer needs to be aged for 5 years (the bottle says best before 2017) and drunk with chocolates. It gave me a new definition of what beer is.

Marsiblursi (2781) from Göteborg, Sweden explains it perfectly on ratebeer.com:
Pours an oily dark brown with orange to red highlight. Small head. The aroma holds buttery oak up front with note of wood shop, coconut, salted peanuts and light vanilla. The malt is all about toffee-ish and fudge-like caramel. Undertones of brown sugar, warming alcohol, leather, cherry jam, resin, prunes and figs. The nose is not complex but super mega uber yummy (and I take yummy over complex any day). The flavour is medium to heavily sweet, light bitter and tiny acidic. Super oaky and brutal malty. Undertones of dark sugar and dark fruits. The mouthfeel is round, soft and light sticky with a near light to medium carbonation. Light astringent, light numbing (from the well hidden, light woodsy alcohol), super buttery and caramelly finish. Lingering aftertaste. Medium to full bodied. Typical top 50 material, too bad it isn’t more available.

What is the lesson? Always try something new when you can. The name ‘Malt Liquor’ shows something strange about naming and laws rather than the style itself. So another lesson is: don't believe the style on the label. It’s not a malt liquor as the name is understood now, in the way a barley wine is not a wine! 

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