All About Beer Magazine

It was July of 2000 and Bryan and Sayuri Baird had just finished completing their new Fishmarket Taproom across the street from the port in Numazu, Japan. They had already applied for a brewing license for their startup, Baird Brewing Co. While the taproom offered Hoegaarden White, Guinness and several other beers, the Bairds were anxious to start serving their own beer. As it turned out, the license would finally be granted six months later, in December.

The standard beer of Japan has always been lager, similar to European export types, but lightened with a bit of rice.

Bryan relates that the interaction with the authorities to obtain his brewing license was particularly intense. Most applicants hire consultants for this process, but he ended up doing it himself, in person. He admits that it took “countless visits” but since he was able to answer all their questions on the spot, it was to his advantage. “We were easily the smallest operation, but if you do exactly what they tell you to do, they will not deny you.”

Beer Club Popeye in Tokyo functions as a kind of beer geek clubhouse.

By January, 2001, Baird Brewing was in production. Bryan was brewing on a 30-liter pilot system he had configured in the United States. Lack of investment capital kept him from purchasing the proper three-barrel system he’d wanted. He and Sayuri had put all the capital they had into the taproom itself, and had decided to start small. Still, in their first year, Baird Brewing produced about 50 barrels and established themselves as a quality leader in Japan’s craft brewing industry.

Glimmers of Variety

The standard beer of Japan has always been lager, similar to European export types, but lightened with a bit of rice. The only major shift in a century of beer drinking was in 1987 with the appearance of Asahi Super Dry, a highly attenuated lager that did not have the heavier maltiness of, say, Kirin Lager. Super Dry eventually carved out a large share of the market, and in the process many of the other popular lagers became “drier” and less sweet.

A few beer enthusiasts, however, were reveling in sweetness. In the late 1980s, Tokyo and other big cities in Japan were experiencing a small, localized boom in Belgian ales, particularly Trappist beers. A small specialty bar, Brussels, opened in Tokyo and was followed by a few others, most notably Bois Cereste, which was known as a favorite of the late Michael Jackson during his visits. While the overall popularity of Belgian beer in Japan is small, the love of these beers by Japanese enthusiasts has been enduring. At present, there are perhaps 30 Belgian beer specialty bars in Tokyo, and perhaps about half as many spread throughout Japan’s smaller cities.

Other kinds of different beers were also coming in. Phred Kaufman, a native of Los Angeles, had moved to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost major island, and began running an international beer bar in 1980. Around 10 years later, he began importing Rogue Ales’ beers from the United States, most of which were branded with his own label, Ezo Beer. Currently, Kaufman handles both Rogue and Ezo, along with a number of minor beers from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland. He was recently joined by Andrew Balmuth, who began importing American microbrew into Japan in 2006, and handles a lot of brews from California, Colorado, the East Coast and other places.

In the early 1990s, Bryan Baird lived in Osaka for several years. He grew to love Japan, and wanted to be involved with it for the rest of his life. He returned to the United States for graduate school, and while there developed a strong interest in craft beer. Back in Japan in 1995, Bryan assumed an ordinary “salaryman” white-collar job in Tokyo.

During that time, Bryan was paying close attention to craft beer in Japan. Certainly there was a lot of news. Microbrewing had just been “legalized,” in the sense that a brewery need only produce 60,000 liters annually to obtain a license to make beer, down from 2 million liters yearly required during the era of oligopoly in brewing. The first two breweries to obtain licenses, Echigo Beer in Niigata and Ohotsk Beer in Hokkaido, were granted them on the same day in 1994.

Echigo threw their opening party in December, 1994—in a newly built brewpub that reminded many of a modern European church— in Niigata, directly north of Tokyo. Their beer, based on popular U.S. microbrew styles—a pale ale, an amber ale and a stout, as I recall—tasted as beautiful as the new brewpub. Ohotsk Beer in Hokkaido had their opening party later, and got into operation the following March.

A Culture of Craft

Little by little, the craft brew industry in Japan grew, despite the collapse of the economic “bubble” economy around the same time. Baird recalls that what struck him most is that Japan is a culture of craftsmen, and that Japanese consumers have a particular appreciation for high quality products. Still, most of Japan’s initial craft beer output was generally of poor quality.

One obvious reason is that homebrewing is illegal in Japan, so there is no army of hobbyists to draw upon when looking for people to brew craft beer professionally. Instead, people hoping to learn would train under brewers from overseas, usually Germany or the United States, who would stay in Japan for rather short periods of time, often just three months, while the local Japanese trainees would scramble to learn as much as possible. From 1995 until 1999, over 175 breweries opened in Japan, followed by about another 100 through 2005.