Spend any time drinking in Japan — and if you’re in Japan, you likely will — and you’ll notice that for all the plethora of sub-brands of beer in the country, they’re all pretty much variations of malted macrobrews produced by the four titans of the Japanese beverage game. Now, thanks to some tradition-bucking sake producers, diverse craft beers are starting to pop up in the country.It’s been a few years since I’ve been there, but I felt that Asahi, Suntory, Sapporo and Kirin treated beers the same as cigarettes are treated in Japan: a whole lot of different labels pitching minute differences, but overall everything’s pretty close to the same. I took a tour of a Kirin brewery in Yokohama, which, like any other good brewery tour, ended with a tasting. I remember being surprised at finding a nice stout on tap, but in every back-alley booze vending machine and 7/11 I came across later, it was still the same macrobrews lining up next to gotrut sake (One Cup is all you need!) and Kirin Strong chu-hi.But now those giants are facing a bevy of suds from sake brewers that have found the market ripe for craft beer. Yes, it’s the result of changing tastes — the craft beer boom hasn’t been limited to the U.S., of course — but it also signals a change in one of Japan’s most traditional institutions. Sake is an important piece Japanese culture, and despite the occasional overindulgence by salarymen, top sakes are judged on how well they stick to decades and centuries of tradition.The whole microbrew industry, on the other hand, revolves around experimentation. And just as the craft beer movement in the U.S. gained momentum by pushing back against bland lagers, breweries in Japan are finding success in more creativity.“Making sake is like judo or flower arranging – you’re judged by how well you stick to the rules; there’s no margin for improvisation,” Youichi Kiuchi, vice president of the Kiuchi brewery, told Lucy Craft at NPR. “But beer is about doing what you want. It’s fun to make and sell. Sake is hard to make and tough to sell.”Craft notes wrote that some breweries are seeing up to 40 percent year-over-year growth; Kiuchi, for one, is brewing 250,000 gallons a year after diving into beers just 15 years ago. But they’re expensive: Craft wrote that bottles run around $9 a pop, and look looking at one random bar in Shibuya, a pretty hip neighborhood in Tokyo, draft beers are around 950-1100 yen.But not everything is super expensive, as this roundup demonstrates — and you can even get good beer in cans! (That Aooni IPA looks pretty rad.) And prices be damned, craft beers are still booming. According to Japan Beer Times, a rad, bilingual publication that’s keeping tabs on the industry, there are over 200 microbreweries already in operation in the country. With all those offerings, I’ve only got one question: Where can I get some?Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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