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Favorite Beer - very important topic


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My dear Chaps, beer is for philistines. The drink of The Masses.

 

When one is done gliding upon the slopes for the day one should partake of a relaxing and convivial wine.

 

To unwind and ease those tired, but satisfied, ski muscles, a tasteful white wine is the treat that all can enjoy.

 

Except in Japan, where you can't get decent wine.

 

 

Mr. Bob!

YMMV

 

[This message has been edited by Ski Japan Guide (edited 10 December 2001).]

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Looking for the Best Beer?

There's only one place to go... BELGIUM!!

Indeed BELGIUM has more than 400 tasteful beers.

I would recommand you the Trappist Beers (only 7 Beers are brewed by trappist monks in the World)

 

OSUSUME: ORVAL, WESTMALLE, CHIMAY, ROCHEFORT and WESTVLETEREN.

If you prefer the light and fruity beers you should try the Gueuze Bellevue, Fruits Defendus.

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Hey Ben2

 

You sound like a man who knows his beers. Admirable!

 

I've always been curious about Belgian beers and have read about them in food and wine magazines. I've drunk a couple of the Trappist beers and also had some fruity beers.

 

They were all very good, but I prefer another kind of beer: amber, bitter or half-and-half...

 

I'm sure this kind of beer also exists in Belgium. Can you recommend a brand for me to try?

 

Tx,

 

badmigraine.

 

PS Cheers!

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Hi Badmigraine,

 

It is nice to find some people that also enjoyed the taste of a belgian beer.

I would definitely recommand you the Orval, you can also try the Kasteel or Kwak but they are a little bit stronger (up to 11% for the Kasteel)

 

These are quite difficult beers to find in Japan. If you're looking for another good one, you should try the DUVEL.

 

Cheers!!

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I lived in Belgium for a while and fell so hard for Duvel that I contacted the brewer thinking I could import it to the States. I may have been dumb for thinking I could pull it off, but they sent me all kinds of bumber stickers and shirts. Ambers are my favorite and I loved De Konnick (sp?). It was a local brew of Antwerp, but the real locals claimed it sucked (as they claimed about most things in that city). In other words, too many good beers to narrow it down much.

 

Nihhon - Yebisu (due to lack of exposure to local micro-brews maybe).

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I lived in Belgium for a while and fell so hard for Duvel that I contacted the brewer thinking I could import it to the States. I may have been dumb for thinking I could pull it off, but they sent me all kinds of bumber stickers and shirts. Ambers are my favorite and I loved De Konnick (sp?). It was a local brew of Antwerp, but the real locals claimed it sucked (as they claimed about most things in that city). In other words, too many good beers to narrow it down much.

 

Nihhon - Yebisu (due to lack of exposure to local micro-brews maybe).

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There's tons of microbrews in Japan.

 

If you're in Tokyo, you can usually find some cans and/or bottles of a few local brews at better booze shops and especially in the basements of department stores where they sell all the food and drink.

 

If you want the full brewpub experience, there's a few of those too. Try T.I.Y. Brewery in Tokyo (you can walk to it from Shinagawa Stn. or one of the Yurikamome Monorail stops--pick up a copy of Metropolis [formerly "Tokyo Classifieds"] and you'll find ads for it and for other places like Ben's Brewpub etc.)

 

There's a bar 2 minutes' walk from Shibuya Stn. called Belgo that has tons and tons of imported beers and some Japanese "ji-beeru".

 

I was in Okayama and walking around a historic area of the city found a small brewery with big shiny brewing tanks in the shop window. They had a lager, an amber, a hefewiesse and a dark/stout type beer. I tried the sampler and they were all delicious and fresh and wonderful, but the amber was my favorite because I like ambers best.

 

There's Ginga Kohgen beer, a local beer you can sometimes get even in convenience stores.

 

The chain izakaya called "Tengu" has draft "beer brown" on the menu, and it's their own specially brewed amber. Pretty good!

 

Last but not least, next to our company is a cheapo chain izakaya called "Chimney", that has 3 kinds of local brews on the menu. Cheap and delicious!! I think they are made in Nagano.

 

In short, there's tons of local brews in Japan, and many more coming along. They were made possible by a change in the laws about 4 years ago: the law formerly required any beer brewer to make massive quantities, or lose their license. This was essentially monopolistic legislation shoved through by your Kirins, Asahis and Sapporos--the effect was the monoculturization or McDonaldization of beers and the stamping out of the wonderful variety, history, flavor and culture of beers in Japan.

 

But the law was changed to reduce the minimum required annual volume, making it possible for local breweries to spring back up and ply their welcome trade.

 

YEAH!!

 

After writing this, I am drooling for my first beer of the day.

 

Mogski, don't you owe me one?

 

I think we may owe Lama one too, but my memory doesn't work right until I start drinking.

 

badmigraine in Tokyo.

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Ginga Kogen is great though ain't it? Especially for the price! BM, which d'you like best, the white can or the blue one? My missus says the blue can type smells of rotten sausages - but then she thinks Japanese rice smells nice too, so there you go.

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I prefer the blue can but either is fine.

 

I seem to have acquired a giant dai-jokki glass beer mug from a chain restaurant and I keep it in my freezer. On a hot summer day upon returning to my rabbit-hutch like living compartment, I would take a can of that Ginga Kohgen beer out of the fridge and put it, too, into the freezer.

 

Then by the time I finished putting away my work clown suit and perusing the stack of bills and erotic chirashi that daily pile up in my mailbox, the beer would be very very chilly, and when poured into that ice-cold thick mug, would produce tiny slivers and needles of ice, just like at your finer bars and restuarants...

 

The feeling of that glorious cold river pouring down my parched throat was one of last summer's secret pleasures...

 

I sure do like beer.

 

In high school my best friend spent a year abroad in Heidelberg, Germany. He got in with the locals and was introduced to a "Beer Museum" they have there.

 

This Beer Museum was open to the public for a small annual membership charge, and when you got inside they had small exhibits and historico-cultural information about beer, beer making down through the ages and of course the various taste and process variations specific to each region, soil, climate, and variety of hops/barley/yeast...

 

He said it was a pretty small place, from the sound of it not much bigger than the "Tobacco and Salt Museum" in Shibuya or the "Meguro Parasitological Museum". But the grand thing was, at the end of the Hall of Exhibits was this long bar area where you could actually drink some 300 of the types of beer displayed in the museum.

 

The brews available ranged from current German and foreign concoctions, to representative samples of many types of beer including lager, porter, stout, ale, bitter, hefewieze, etc.

 

There was also a sizeable number of historical brews on tap, including European medieval and rennaissance beers made from recipes written on parchment and found in old libraries and castles, beers from the Ottoman, Central Asian and probably (I remember reading about this one in the paper) ancient Egypt (they found the recipe in an amphora on a dig somewhere a few years back).

 

My friend's project for his year abroad was to make it through at least one glass of all 300 brews available in the museum, but he somehow got hung up on number 7 or 8 and never made it past that.

 

Sort of like when you go to your favorite Italian restaurant, you always order the same three things, and never even bother to try anything else on the menu.

 

badmigraine in Tokyo.

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guess i wasn't clear enough, or i got

lost in dialect or something. . .

 

by homebrew shops, i didn't mean microbrews

or microbreweries, although all that info

is useful and appreciated. . .

 

i meant retail stores

where you can go and buy carbuoys,

fermentors, malt, hops, grain, yeast and the

like, so that joe 12-pack can brew at home.

 

do the new j-laws allow for this ? me and

the crew brew every week, and i'd like

to continue upon moving. i like beer alot.

 

thanks.

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badmigraine, I think that's prolly a badhangover you've got there. I've rather gotten out of the habit of Ginga Kogen but having been reminded I'll have to reacquaint myself.

 

Talking of Chimay, having forked out the many tokens required to buy it, I always find it bland and unexciting.

 

Anybody tried Suwa's Reijin beer? Not bad at all.

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Ocean11, bouyed by the carbonated fumes of this thread, I invested 430 yen in a chilled bottle of Chimay "bruin" (in the low tongues, that probably means brown, not a UCLA football player), and knocked it back with a plate of pasta and salad.

 

Sad to say your assessment is correct...bland and unexciting. I'd have done better to get another blue can of Ginga Kohgen.

 

Even so, that Chimay did a workmanlike job of setting up my taste buds for this nice glass of Wyndham Estate Bin 555 Shiraz (980 yen per bottle, I'm stocking up).

 

Oh and look at that bottle of Laprhoaig over there!

 

As Matt Drudge would say, "Developing..."

 

 

badmigraine in Tokyo.

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Belgium beer is really nice, and it is true that they really have a lot of different ones.

But if you guys really like beer, you also should give the German ones a try!

"Rothaus Tannenzaepfchen" is a great one from the black forest, or try some of the micro breweries. And if you go for bitter beer, give the ones from northern Germany a shot. And in the summer, nothing is better than a big cool "Weissbier" from Bavaria.

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