Our latest blind tasting ranks Japanese beers like Sapporo, Kirin, and Asahi, as well as some smaller Japanese and rice-based brews.
If you ask your local craft beer head for her go-to pint of choice, chances are she’s not going to name a mass-market Japanese import. Yet if you’re looking for a cold brew to go with sushi or teppanyaki, is there really any other way to go? Would you drop a shot of sake into a Sam Adams? Only a philistine etc. Few would argue that rice-based Japanese lagers don’t deserve their place in the beer solar system, and frankly, they’re pretty good in their own right — light, crispy, and refreshing. Just as with Coors, Bud, and Miller, the Japanese import market has its own big three — Sapporo, Asahi, and Kirin. And as with their American counterparts (which are also somewhat similar in taste, Bud even uses rice) chances are you have a favorite. But is that choice actually based on taste or something else? Like maybe you just like the pretty picture on the bottle, ever thought of that, dumbass? I kid, I kid. This is one of those kind-of-dumb, kind-of-relevant questions I find myself asking every time I eat sushi and finally I figured the only way to settle it was with a blind taste test. So I went down to my local Total Wine & Liquor, which tends to have a pretty good selection of imports, and bought every Japanese or rice-based brew I could find. Then, with a group of about 10 adults, we tasted each, collecting our notes and naming our favorites. For the group ranking, I simply added up everyone’s ranking of each beer and then tabulated it like golf: lowest score wins. The lineup: Original Notes (tasted sixth): Look: Pale yellow with lacy head. Smell: Not getting much from this one. Taste: Doesn’t taste like much either. Feels like a low cal or an NA, almost a hard seltzer. Not offering much other than light sweetness.5/10 Reaction Upon Seeing The Label: I guess I was way off thinking this one was an NA or a low-cal option, though in my experience, most weizenbocks are darker and with higher alcohol content. This “snow” weizen just didn’t seem to offer much flavor, to me. That said, it wasn’t bad. It was easy enough to drink, just not very interesting. It was light enough, but it lacked the bigger bubbles and hop bite of the more standard rice pilsners. Original Notes (tasted second): Look: Pale yellow and cloudy. Smell: Oranges on the nose. Taste: Orange and hoppy, with another flavor I don’t recognize. Maybe an herb or something? This one is fine. Not in love, just maybe a little too complex for me and it kind of dries my mouth out.5/10 Reaction Upon Seeing The Label: Master Gao’s is a 7.6% ABV brew that’s “unfiltered and unpasteurized,” and meant to taste something like a brut IPA. I pretty much never order IPAs (I tend to prefer more color and fewer hops), so perhaps not surprisingly, it wasn’t my favorite. Maybe it was a little funky. I actually thought I was tasting some kind of orange hibiscus Belgian wit. That being said, I never would’ve guessed it was the booziest of the bunch, so… if you’re looking for something like that, it’s not a bad choice. Original Notes (tasted fifth): Look: Golden and foamy. Smell: Smells like another rice lager, this one with a little more of that uriney pils smell. Taste: Decent rice lager, but not as good as the last version of this [which was sample 3, the Kawaba Pils]. This tastes more like a cheap American lager, like a PBR or Hamm’s.6/10. Reaction Upon Seeing The Label: To partly answer my question in the introduction, it turned out Kirin Ichiban was my least favorite of the big three Japanese brews. I guess for me that would make it the Coors Light of Japan (Coors Original still rules). I don’t know how to describe the malt component of a pils, the part that’s not the crisp effervescence, other than uriney, and this one was definitely leaning toward the uriney end of the spectrum. That being said, I thought it reminded me of a PBR, and I’ve happily drunk a good many PBRs in my life. Original Notes (tasted fourth): Look: A nice caramel amber color, clear. Smell: Sort of a raisin-y bran smell. Like raisin bread. Taste: I love the caramel malt of this, but the raisin/prune flavor isn’t my favorite. Tastes boozier than the others. Seems like it’d be good in smaller doses.
