Tokyo Weekender - November 2017
Our November issue is out, featuring a jam-packed end-of-year special: 42 Christmas gift shopping ideas and 10 bonenkai spots. Plus: The avant-garde world of butoh dance, Japanese teen prodigies, and a special supplement guide to Akita. Here's where to find a copy around Tokyo: www.tokyoweekender.com/pickup/
Our November issue is out, featuring a jam-packed end-of-year special: 42 Christmas gift shopping ideas and 10 bonenkai spots. Plus: The avant-garde world of butoh dance, Japanese teen prodigies, and a special supplement guide to Akita. Here's where to find a copy around Tokyo: www.tokyoweekender.com/pickup/
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[ END-OF-YEAR SPECIAL PROMOTION ]<br />
Words by Alec Jordan, photos by Robert Kirsch<br />
Now that your bonenkai experience is<br />
sorted, perhaps you want to learn a little<br />
more about the beer you’ll be sipping<br />
on as you celebrate the festive season. A<br />
visit to Suntory’s brewery is educational<br />
up front, with a delicious finish<br />
Japan may be best known for sake,<br />
but if you go to bars, pubs, and<br />
izakayas, the drink that you’ll most<br />
commonly find being poured is beer.<br />
Japan consumed more than 2.72<br />
million kiloliters – that’s 718.5 million gallons<br />
– of the beverage in 2015, and is showing no<br />
signs of slowing down.<br />
One of the giants of Japanese beer is<br />
Suntory, and their flagship product is The<br />
Premium Malt’s, an easy drinking lager that<br />
goes great with Japanese food, whether it’s<br />
yakitori skewers from a yatai during the summer<br />
or a hearty yakiniku feast in the middle<br />
of winter.<br />
Suntory has four breweries in Japan: one<br />
in <strong>Tokyo</strong>’s Musashino area, one in Kyoto, one<br />
in Gunma, and one in Kumamoto, and tours<br />
are available at three of the breweries. When<br />
we heard about the opportunity to visit their<br />
Musashino brewery recently, we jumped at<br />
the chance.<br />
A short walk from Fuchu Hommachi<br />
Station, the brewery is a massive operation,<br />
producing hundreds of thousands of liters<br />
of beer every day. Walking into the facilities,<br />
we were greeted by our tour guide, who led<br />
us to a small auditorium where an instructional<br />
video played and explained some of<br />
the things that make The Premium Malt’s the<br />
unique beer that it is – and as the tour moved<br />
into the manufacturing facilities, we got to<br />
see these for ourselves.<br />
As our tour guide explained, only three<br />
ingredients go into The Premium Malt’s:<br />
water, barley, and hops. The first, and most<br />
plentiful ingredient in beer is water. In fact,<br />
beer is 90 percent water – so if anyone tries<br />
to tell you that beer isn’t a healthy drink, you<br />
can always counter with that! In order to ensure<br />
a plentiful supply of 100 percent natural<br />
water, each of Suntory’s four breweries is<br />
located close to a fresh water source. In the<br />
case of the brewery in Musashino, the water<br />
source is the Tama River, and water for the<br />
beer is drawn daily from an enormous well<br />
at the brewery. Every day, Suntory’s brewers<br />
taste the water to make sure it will bring out<br />
the best of the other two ingredients.<br />
What comes next is barley. Suntory<br />
uses the finest two-row barley to make its<br />
malt, and adds a rarely found diamond malt<br />
(which comes from Czech Republic and surrounding<br />
countries) to its barley mix, making<br />
30 | NOVEMBER <strong>2017</strong> | TOKYO WEEKENDER