Tokyo Weekender - November 2017

[ END-OF-YEAR SPECIAL PROMOTION ]
Words by Alec Jordan, photos by Robert Kirsch
Now that your bonenkai experience is
sorted, perhaps you want to learn a little
more about the beer you’ll be sipping
on as you celebrate the festive season. A
visit to Suntory’s brewery is educational
up front, with a delicious finish
Japan may be best known for sake,
but if you go to bars, pubs, and
izakayas, the drink that you’ll most
commonly find being poured is beer.
Japan consumed more than 2.72
million kiloliters – that’s 718.5 million gallons
– of the beverage in 2015, and is showing no
signs of slowing down.
One of the giants of Japanese beer is
Suntory, and their flagship product is The
Premium Malt’s, an easy drinking lager that
goes great with Japanese food, whether it’s
yakitori skewers from a yatai during the summer
or a hearty yakiniku feast in the middle
of winter.
Suntory has four breweries in Japan: one
in Tokyo’s Musashino area, one in Kyoto, one
in Gunma, and one in Kumamoto, and tours
are available at three of the breweries. When
we heard about the opportunity to visit their
Musashino brewery recently, we jumped at
the chance.
A short walk from Fuchu Hommachi
Station, the brewery is a massive operation,
producing hundreds of thousands of liters
of beer every day. Walking into the facilities,
we were greeted by our tour guide, who led
us to a small auditorium where an instructional
video played and explained some of
the things that make The Premium Malt’s the
unique beer that it is – and as the tour moved
into the manufacturing facilities, we got to
see these for ourselves.
As our tour guide explained, only three
ingredients go into The Premium Malt’s:
water, barley, and hops. The first, and most
plentiful ingredient in beer is water. In fact,
beer is 90 percent water – so if anyone tries
to tell you that beer isn’t a healthy drink, you
can always counter with that! In order to ensure
a plentiful supply of 100 percent natural
water, each of Suntory’s four breweries is
located close to a fresh water source. In the
case of the brewery in Musashino, the water
source is the Tama River, and water for the
beer is drawn daily from an enormous well
at the brewery. Every day, Suntory’s brewers
taste the water to make sure it will bring out
the best of the other two ingredients.
What comes next is barley. Suntory
uses the finest two-row barley to make its
malt, and adds a rarely found diamond malt
(which comes from Czech Republic and surrounding
countries) to its barley mix, making
30 | NOVEMBER 2017 | TOKYO WEEKENDER