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.”

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.

The Tokyo tasting was a small affair managed by my friend, Bryan Harrell, a writer living in that city (www.bento.com/brews.html), with and for the benefit of his beer enthusiast friends. There were two of these groups. The Tokyo Good Beer Club is a consumer group (www.goodbeerclub.org) composed of Japanese beer enthusiasts and homebrewers with just a few foreign residents (all of whom spoke Japanese fairly well). Most of the Japanese present spoke some English. Although Harrell translated for me, I had no trouble communicating with most of them. There was also the Tokyo Beer Research Club (mostly Japanese), a group with a much greater knowledge of beer than the first. There were 30 participants, including 5 women.

Bakushu Club Popeye

This is Japan’s best beer pub. They have 40 beers on tap―23 of them ji-beer (or ji-biiru, Japanese craft beer) of the approximately 250 craft beers in Japan, plus Asahi Stout and two on cask! That’s an impressive selection for such a small place. Prices average Y935 for a standard US pint (about $8.40). There’s also Rogue’s Brutal Bitter, Shakespeare Stout and Old Crustacean Barleywine; Hair of the Dog Fred and Ruth (USA); Erdinger Hefe-Weizen, Jever Pils, Kostrizer Schwartz (Germany); Abbot Ale (United Kingdom); Hoegaarden White (Belgium); and Murphy’s Stout (Ireland). Popeye’s owner, Tatsuo Aoki, told us that in the mid-1990s his bar was doing just so-so until he added ji-beer and Belgian beers to his menu. That’s when things turned around for him.

A couple of months earlier, I had sent Harrell a list of beer styles and chocolate types I would need. To save money, we limited ourselves to seven combinations, still an expensive list by any standard. Harrell had the “Rules of Chocolate” translated into Japanese for the occasion, and they were very well received.

I went to Popeye’s the night before to meet with Harrell and firm out details with Mr. Aoki. The tastings were 150 milliliters, or 5 ounces, in size.

But if you’re looking for something  with a bit of local flavor, think about hitting the highway, because a road trip is about the only way you’ll be able to sample the handiwork of most of this country’s small-scale brewers. Although a handful of microbrews are readily available in major cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, which are also home to a number of brewpubs, the availability of craft beers from elsewhere in Japan tendw to be limited. To make matters more difficult, beer festivals are few and far between, retailers wary of unfamiliar products with limited shelf lives, and bars specializing in extensive selections of microbrews almost nonexistent.

That’s not to say that microbrewed beers have had no perceptible impact on the Japanese market, though no one would go so far as to suggest that they pose any threat to the megabrewers. Although observers and brewers alike say that more consumer education is needed, there’s little doubt that Japanese beer fans are savvier than they were in 1994, when the government partially deregulated the industry, opening the doors for a new generation of brewers.  Among them are three of the first to enter the market: Echigo in Niigata Prefecture on the Sea of Japan side of the main island of Honshu, ’s Echigo Brauhaus, Okhotsk on the northern island of Hokkaido and Kanagawa Prefecture’s Sankt Gallen, located just south or Tokyo.

“A couple of years ago, visitors to the Great Japan Beer Festival would point and say, ‘Give me this. Give me that,’” notes Ryouji Oda, head of the Japan Craft Beer Association, a consumer-oriented group that organizes beer-related events and evaluation classes. “Now, they say, ‘I’d like a pale ale.’ Or, ‘I’d like a weizen.’”

Prior to the revision of the law, the industry was dominated by four major players whose product lines largely reflected a lager-oriented German heritage: traditional market leader Kirin Brewery Co.; upstart Asahi Breweries, whose wildly successful Asahi Super Dry put it hot on the heels of Kirin; venerable Sapporo Breweries; and distiller Suntory, the last company to enter the business in the pre-deregulation years. The only other domestic beer maker at the time was Orion, a much smaller regional based in Okinawa.

Japan’s beer landscape was forever altered seven years ago during the administration of then Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa. Smaller producers were allowed to enter the market for the first time when the minimum production requirement was lowered from 2,000 kiloliters (16,800 US barrels) per year to 60 kiloliters (504 barrels) for beer and just 6 kiloliters (50 barrels) for happoshu, a catch-all category for malt beverages that cannot legally be called beer and are therefore taxed at a lower rate. By comparison, Kirin, one of the world’s leading brewing companies, sold a total of 2.94 million kiloliters  (24.7 million barrels) of beer and happoshu in 1999.

To put things in perspective, consider this: Modern Brewery Age estimates that only about 25 US specialty breweries, including Anchor, Sierra Nevada, Redhook, Pyramid and Widmer, are now capable of producing more than 16,800 barrels per year. To qualify for a brewing license in pre-deregulation Japan, these well-established US names would have been required to have the capacity to produce that much beer from the moment they left the starting gate. More than likely, that would have been an impossibility for all.

As the law now stands, however, most of the familiar US craftbrewers would be able to gain admission to the club, even if they weren’t able to produce to requisite 60 kiloliters per year at the outset. Progress toward that goal would be monitored over a three-year stretch during which they’d have to apply annually for a one-year temporary brewing license. Obtaining a permanent license, on the other hand, requires proof of the ability to meet the minimum production requirement on a consistent basis.

For some brewers, that can be a constant headache. Purchasing habits vary according to season and location. An unusually cool summer can hurt brewers of all sizes, wherever they may be situated. And in more northerly climes, winter can really put the chill on beer consumption. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that draft beer of any kind was a summertime-only phenomenon in Japan.

Location, Location, Location

Not surprisingly, location can mean everything. As in North America, brewers in Japan like to tout the virtues of consuming beer where it’s at its freshest: the source. But unlike English-speaking countries, where terms like “micro” or “craft” are used to indicate the size of the operation or the skill of the brewer, the Japanese refer to the products of small breweries as jibiiru, which means “local beer.” It’s a term that some brewers take quite literally.

Although hundreds of brewpubs and microbreweries have sprung up in Japan since deregulation, only a handful have managed to establish a foothold outside of their own backyards. The vast majority are still local in orientation, some because they were established as tourist attractions designed by “third-sector” ventures organized by public and private entities to help revive depressed local economies. Others are private-sector brewpubs that cater mainly to the local market, though some may bottle small quantities of their beer for souvenir-seeking travelers or for use in gift packs sold  during the traditional summer and winter gift-giving seasons.

While  there are those who are quite content not to stray too far from home, others are setting their sights farther afield. In some cases, they’re bypassing the retail maze by hawking their wares via the Internet; in others, they’re building restaurant chains to supply their beer to the thirsty and curious up and down the archipelago.

“There are more than 300 breweries in this country, and that means there are probably 300 different reasons for making beer,” says John Schultz, owner of Minami Aizu Brewing,  a micro in rural Fukushima Prefecture and the only brewery owned and operated by a foreign-born entrepreneur, though others are on the way.

Schultz’s reason is one that will resonate with his peers in North America. After a lengthy career in the fast-paced world of Tokyo’s securities industry, the amateur homebrewer was looking for an occupation that suited his dream of living the rest of his life in Japan in a mountain village that spends much of the winter buried under a deep blanket of snow. Unlike so many other dreamers in this world, Schultz has had the good fortune to realize his by turning a hobby into a profession.

“There are other homebrewers who turned professional because they like brewing,” Schultz notes. “A lot of them would like to start their own breweries, but they don’t have the capital. Money’s the main barrier. It’s a lot cheaper in the United States, because there’s used equipment and land isn’t so expensive.”

Expertise from Abroad

While Schultz made the leap from homebrewing, fate decided the career paths of others, including Satoshi Niwa of Hakusekikan Brewery, located within a museum complex in Gifu Prefecture.

“Our management decided to diversify, and my boss asked me to start brewing. I didn’t have any experience or knowledge about beer, but I believed I could make good beer someday if I put my mind to it,” Niwa said.

Fans of Hakusekikan’s Super Vintage barley wine, which at 14 percent alcohol is reputedly the strongest beer brewed in Japan, would be quick to point out that he’s just being humble.