More Beer!

Hello all!

Last weekend, my girlfriend arranged another visit to a brewery! This time it was Asahi! I was pretty excited again, but this time not because of the quality of the beer, but rather the location and the trip towards it.

The route took us on the section from Shibusawa to Shin-Matsuda, one of the most beautiful parts of the Odakyu Odawara line. From the rather straight sections on the Kanto plains, a tunnel takes you to the curves of the Sakawagawa river flow (酒匂川).

Not my video, but it gives a good impression on how it looks from the front.

Anyway, Asahi isn't the best of beers and you can taste it. At first I thought they were using pure ingredients, like with Suntory Premium Malts, but I was wrong. Very wrong. During the tour, the ingredients were explained and although my Japanese isn't very well yet, I managed to understand that cornstarch, potato starch and sugar are added in the brewing process as well. I was disappoint.

Despite the beautiful surroundings of this hyper-modern factory, the great care they take in maintaining the quality level of the beer (I say 'quality level', not 'quality' here!), the taste is still extremely bland and it tastes more like water, rather than beer. It's a shame this is one is the largest beer brewery in Japan (about 40% of the market) and still only produces a quite boring brew. I guess the Japanese taste for beer isn't that refined yet. My only hope for the future of beer now lies on the efforts of the micro and craft breweries.

Cheers!