Craft Beer Holiday 2018

Each year, as the Japanese beer festival season draws to a close, one of the best events in the Kansai region pops up on the radar. Craft Beer Holiday, which is held over four days in the spacious Osaka Jo Koen, provides a good selection of beers from well-established breweries -- unlike, say, the Craft Beer Live event, which focuses entirely on Kansai-area beer makers, including very new or small outfits, many of which are simply side projects of hotels or rural resorts.

The venue is wide enough for the crowds. two long lines of beer/food stalls, with a 15-meter space in between, and plenty of park space for those wanting to spread out a ground cover and enjoy their beers in the shade.

This year's event was on from October 5 to 9, and featured 21 breweries, including some of the most highly regarded ones (Shiga Kogen, Fujizakura, Kyoto Brewing) and 15 food booths. We strolled around, taking our samples here and there. Here are some of the high(and)lowlights.

Fujizakura 20th Anniversary Autumn Ale
Spritzy, fruity, nose with citrus, wheat, light banana, and gentle spice. Hazy medium straw, good lacing. Delicate fruit, peach, loquat, and gets richer in mid palate, with overripe pears and apple. Rich and balanced. Works out nicely at all palate stages.
Note: Fujizakura produces some of the best wheat beers in Japan.

Kyoto Brewing Kirisute Gomen (License to Kill) Imperial Stout
Nice chocolate, roast malt nose, fresh and sweet. Pitch black, with a tan head. Deep semi-sweet chocolate, some berries, dark bitterness. Medium body (just a touch light for the style), somewhat warming, and back-end thickness on the tongue. Rich and tasty, this one should only get better with age.

Outsider Pit Bull Barley Wine
Big fruity nose, with toffee, chocolate, prunes, dark fruit, sugar, and lots of alcohol fumes. It is listed at a whopping 15%. Medium dark reddish-brown color, small tan head. Very sweet, ripe dark fruit, a mixture of thick stone fruits, cherries, berries, and baked apple. Smooth, heavy, and slick on the tongue. Nice aroma, indeed. Though it's been aged for two years, this one certainly need more time to develop the flavors.
Note: The brewer at Outsider formerly worked at the now-defunct Hakusekikan, where some 20 years ago he produced two legendary beers, Hurricane and Super Vintage. The long-aged versions of these two are remarkable, if you can ever find them. When I asked the stall staff if Pit Bull was an attempt to recreate Super Vintage, he said, "No, we're trying to surpass it."

Y Market Funky Monkey Haze
 Sweet weird tropical fruit and stone fruit nose. Very pale and hazy (murky) pear juice color Tropical fruit, thick sweet candy slop, peaches pears, mango, with almost no bitterness. Thins out after mid palate. Typical for the style, or maybe a touch light on the flavor profile. Okay, sort of.
Note: I'm hoping that we have run the course with this "hazy" and "juicy" NEIPA style of kiddy beers (one person calls them "teen pop" drinks).
Note 2: The brewery staff had the effrontery to ask for four tickets, double the regular price, for a full glass of this mess; I gave them one and got a quarter glass -- and I didn't finish even that amount).

                         Two Japanese master brewers: 
                            Sato-san, of Shiga Kogen, (center) and Fujizakura's Miyashita-san (right).

So, though the festival season is now pretty much over for the year, there are many bar anniversary, tap takeover, and meet-the-brewer events. Get out and enjoy what you can.

Craft Beer Fest Kyoto 2018 / 地ビール祭京都 2018

The 2018 beer festival season in the Kansai region kicked off on Sunday, May 13 in Kyoto. The Craft Beer Fest Kyoto 2018 was the ninth iteration of this annual festival.

It was a dim rainy day, but fortunately the venue is a long (800-meter) covered shopping arcade. The lousy wet weather may have kept some people home, but it also made things more crowded, as the side streets were not an outlet for patrons desiring a respite from the crush.

Thirty five Japanese breweries provided nearly 200 varieties of beer. Breweries new to the festival this year included Hinotani Beer, Kibi Doteshita Beer, Kyoto Beer Lab/Cha Beer, Kyoto Woodmill Brewery, Rise & Win Brewing Co., and Songbird.

I was interested in the new Kyoto breweries (above), and found that they were well on their way to making interesting and unusual beers. Kyoto Beer Lab features a number of tea brews (hence "Cha" Beer).

Also of interest was Songbird, a true nanobrewery located in Chiba. The friendly owners specialize in Belgian-style beers, and their Natsumikan to Shoga wheat beer did not disappoint.


As is true every year, the venue got crowded soon after opening time. It was fairly manageable for for the most part; however there were bottlenecks for several stretches, and other areas proved to be nigh impassable. I did not venture east of the park area, and hence missed the entire A Section, which held a few beer stands I'd hoped to visit, including Outsider.

                                                 the Fujizakura Heights brewer, a true master...

Stalwart breweries, Kyoto Brewing and Fujizakura Heights, provided the highlights of the festival (for me anyway). Kyoto Brewing unveiled their third anniversary beer, Sanshunen, a tasty IPA made from a kettle sour. Fujizakura Heights had two different 20th anniversary beer, but their Dragon Mosaic 2017 weizenbock was a superbly well-rounded and juicy exemplar of the style.

Well into the afternoon and after several samples, the rain and crowds no longer seemed to matter.

Next up: Craft Beer Live in Osaka (May 26-27)

Japanese Breweries at the World Beer Cup 2014 / ワールドビールカップ2014に日本醸造所

The 2014 World Beer Cup winners were announced on April 11, and three Japanese breweries won awards.

The WBC is the largest (and probably the "most prestigious" -- at least, it calls itself so) international beer competition, and has been held every two years since 1996.

Fujizakura Kogen Beer (better known as "Fujizakura Heights" in Japan) took the silver medal in the South German-Style Hefeweizen/Hefeweissbier category (78 entries) for its Weizen. This beer was also a silver medal winner in 2008.

I’ve enjoyed this weizen on several occasions, and it gives off superb banana and bubble gum aromas. The flavors are quite fresh and fruity, with lemon and then sweet pears.  It’s a fairly big, intense and over-the-top weizen. Fujizakura Kogen is regarded as one of the top craft breweries in Japan, especially for their wheat and smoked beers.

Coedo Brewery’s Kyara won silver in the American-Style Amber group (34 entries). In 2010, Coedo also won a silver medal for its Beniaka.

Kyara is widely available throughout Japan. It has a rich aroma with good hopping. The initial sips provide a solid hit of hopping; the mid palate goes deeper with the hops and then becomes balanced; the finish is mild, malty, and the hops linger on the tongue a good while. Very tasty, and much improved on the version they originally came out with a few years ago.

The big surprise for Japan craft beer fans is the gold medal won by Asahi Breweries for its flagship brew, Asahi Super Dry, besting 88 other entries in the International-Style Lager category. This is the most popular beer in Japan, and is pretty much reviled by beer geeks.

I recently tried Super Dry for the first time in several years. My tasting notes are as follows: A little cardboard and a little grassiness in the aroma. Initial flavors have a touch of hay / the mid palate goes to a harsher grass and some hops make an appearance / the finish is mildly sweet (so it’s not really completely "dry"). Thin body. Not as bad as I remember it (or, perhaps, as I think I remember it…).

Super Dry is brewed overseas at a number of different locations -- the European version at Staropramen, in the UK at Shepherd Neame, and in North America at the Molson Vancouver brewery. I assume the medal-winning brew is the N. Am. version. It is not an all-malt premium lager, as it incorporates a certain amount of corn and rice in order to lighten the body and flavor profile.

Overall, these three medals represent something of a drop off for the nation’s brewers in this global competition.

Japanese brewers were awarded four medals in 2012

and five in 2010

nine in 2008

ten in 2006

five in 2004

two in 2002,

fourteen in 2000

nine in 1998

and one in the inaugural year of 1996

Clearly the field is getting more crowded and more sophisticated. The number of breweries entering the World Beer Cup was 1,403, compared to only 828 in 2012; and the total number of beers they entered stood at 4,754, which is a jump up from the 4,014 in 2012. 

For more information and a lot of statistics, see the World Beer Cup Fact Sheet.

In any case, you should be your own judge. Seek out these three beers (yes, even Super Dry) and give them a go.