Quiet are the cold months in Japan. Long are the hours of darkness. Yet deep, so very deep, is the thirst of the beer drinker. May beer be your light, your warmth, your music!

To that end, it’s a damn good thing that bars specializing in craft beer continue opening across Japan. Breweries, too. The pace is steady in larger cities, but we’re even seeing such bars pop up in small towns. Now if we could just see greater beer selection in airports, train stations, bus centers…
With Japan’s beer festivals in hibernation during the winter, we cast our eyes overseas for this issue’s report on interesting happenings in the beer world.

Awards

If you are one that doesn’t think much of beer competitions, now is your opportunity to go get your next beer and revisit this news report in the section below entitled, “Craft Beer Exodus”. If hearing that a handful of Japanese breweries won awards at major international competitions makes you all warm and giddy, then hurry up and read on! The World Beer Awards competition based in England receives entries from some of the most accomplished breweries in the world and features an interesting organizational concept. After regional competitions, judges then give world awards based on style. Those beers next compete against each other in more general categories, like “dark beer” or “pale beer”. Then the category winners compete for the title of world’s best beer, at least according to the international judging panel. Finally, the world’s best beer is put in a special container and launched into space along with recordings of world music and “hello” in a handful of languages. If you believed that last sentence, please enjoy another beer. What you earthlings don’t realize is that billions of years ago, another civilization did this very same thing. The container collided with a comet that kept the beer’s residual yeast in frozen suspension until the comet struck earth. That yeast gave rise to life. Yes, your origins are a previous world’s best beer (and that metaphor in the preceding feature about craft beer traveling like a meteor is more apt than you think).

This world’s best beer for 2014 was a Belgian-style blonde called Tongerlo Blond, from Haacht Brewery in Belgium. Among individual styles, Fujizakura won for Best Smoked Beer, Tazawako for Dortmunder, and Minoh for Stout. While you may all be proud that Japan won in these competitive individual style categories, unfortunately these beers will not be responsible for life on another planet later. Best to enjoy them here.

The European Beer Star competition, which judges beers according to classic European styles, was a tough one for Japan last year, with only one brewery claiming hardware. Tazawako won silver for Dusseldorf-style Altbier and bronze for German-Style Doppelbock Dunkel. U.S. and European breweries tended to dominate these awards, but there were a few surprising newcomers to the stage. Three medals went out to breweries in Kazakhstan, Cambodia and Taiwan. Two countries not traditionally known for their beers, Iceland and Israel, also fared well. If those two countries did a collaboration beer, would it be a double I… PA? If you thought that was funny, please enjoy another beer. If you did not, please enjoy another beer.

Craft Beer Exodus

If you are one of those beer competition detractors that skipped the previous section, please be aware that we revealed the origins of human life and you should go back and read it. For those of you that have been reading all along, now it is your opportunity to go get another beer and wait for the others to catch up.

Just as the volume and range of craft beer imports to Japan increase, so too does the volume of Japanese craft beer being exported. Dozens of countries around the world are putting Japanese craft on tap and store shelves. Japanese breweries are also increasingly participating in festivals in Asia, Europe and North America. In November, The Shelton Brothers, a family-run importer in the U.S., hosted a two-day event in Southern California that was attended by 70 breweries from around the world, including Baird, Harvest Moon, Minoh and Shiga Kogen. The Baird team later traveled up the coast for tap take-over events in San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle.

Coedo, meanwhile, has made a major push into America via Craft Imports. The beers are already being distributed as bottles and kegs in California, Illinois, Nevada, Minnesota and Texas. Not coincidentally, these five areas are known for sake enthusiasm as well. L.A. & San Diego, Chicago, Las Vegas… OK, so the first three states are easy to understand, but Minnesota and Texas? Actually, they both have sake breweries and quite a lot of Japanese restaurants, too. Still, we naturally want to see Japanese craft beer appear more and more in regular beer bars overseas.

It’s fair to note that Kiuchi (Hitachino Nest) has been exporting to America and other countries for many years now, proving that Japanese craft beer both exists and is good. In some ways it reminds us of how Belgian beers partly paved the way for premium-priced craft beer in America and Japan. It seems that many retailers are willing to give other Japanese craft beers a chance because of their success with Hitachino Nest. This trend won’t last if the new beers aren’t fresh and have off-flavors. If you’re a brewery thinking of exporting, please try to ensure your beers are stable for export. They don’t have to be good enough to launch into space for engendering future life, but they do need to survive the long trip to other continents. Choosing your importer carefully is just as important. Sorry for the sermon, but we care about you.

Kiuchi has been a pioneer, but there was actually one brewery before them turning eyes in overseas markets: Sapporo. We’ve been making space travel jokes, but Sapporo’s jumbo silver can really does look like a space capsule and has drawn a lot of attention to itself on crowded supermarket shelves. As an industrial lager, it was light but consistent. In the big picture, it was a plus for Japanese beer. For all the worry about whether Japan’s big breweries are taking advantage of craft beer now, more often than you realize, craft beer has benefited from the big guys.

Japanese craft beer received some additional attention at the Great American Beer Festival last year care of Japan-based importer of American craft beer, AQ Bevolution. President Albert Kuwano Bakonyvari gave a presentation on the history and current state of Japan’s craft beer industry. While it was to provide a context for breweries considering export to Japan, the presentation also raised the profile of Japanese craft beer at America’s largest (and craziest) craft beer festival. Certainly, more people are now thirsty for Japanese craft beer. Maybe Japan will see some tasty new imports as well.

Crisis in Cow Country

Japan Beer Times senior writer Kumagai Jinya rang the alarm bells at company headquarters just before we were going to press. He reports the following…
Some shocking new just came in: Hidatakayama Beer in Gifu’s Takayama City (introduced in our summer 2011 issue), makers of high-alcohol craft beers like Karumina, are facing a threat to their continued operations. The reason is the construction of the Chubu Jûkan Expressway, which will connect Nagano Prefecture’s Matsumoto City with Fukui City. The brewery has been asked to move because it sits squarely in the planned path of the expressway.
Demands to vacate the property began about three years ago, but president Azuchi Norihisa complained, “It seemed obvious to me that the highway construction outfit would build me a new brewery, but the truth is that they simply settled on a value for my buildings and equipment, and offered that amount.”

The brewery buildings and equipment are mostly the same he has used since establishing the company in 1996. So basically the highway builders determined that after twenty years they were no longer of a value sufficient to build him a new brewery. Also, even if they were to build him a new facility on separate land and he were to move his equipment, there is no guarantee, either, that there would be an available water source. The deeper you have to dig your well, the more it costs. Azuchi has continued pushing back against the value that the highway builders have been asserting, but naturally as time goes by, his property value supposedly continues to drop.

The construction of the expressway is expected to take seven years. There is no movement yet in the locale of the brewery, but a deadline for action is fast approaching. Hidatakayama Brewery has a stable of fans at many beer bars across Japan. While they don’t attend many events, some people may have discovered them at Toyama’s Tanabata Beer Festa. We hope Azuchi is able to win the good fight and keep brewing.

This article was published in Japan Beer Times # () and is among the limited content available online. Order your copy through our online shop or download the digital version from the iTunes store to access the full contents of this issue.