With the on-coming onslaught of the unbearably humid Japanese summer Beer manufacturers in Japan are finding ways to maximise their sales, and big supermarket chain Aeon recently launched a ￥88 ($1) daisan (beer-like drink) onto the market. Tax on alcohol is (compared to say the UK) very cheap, with whiskeys and other spirits in off-licenses [...]
One of the bigger supermarkets around here (Hankyu) is having a Hokkaido Fair at the moment with speciality food and craft beers from the region. Hokkaido, for those that don’t know, is the northern most of the 4 main Japan islands, where Sapporo Beer is from (Sapporo city is kind of the capital of Hokkaido). [...]
As anyone who has a passing interest in football – and that doesn’t describe me – knows, there’s the World Cup taking place this year in South Africa. Now, I have no interest in football, but I do have perhaps more than a passing interest in Japanese beers, so this new can design caught my [...]
This question bugged me for quite a while when I first discovered that Japan has 3 categories of beer, and I don’t mean lager, beer, bitter, etc. Thankfully, an article in the Daily Yomiuri yesterday cleared it up for me. The reason Japan has 3 different categories of beer is essentially for tax reasons. Regular [...]
