Bad Ideas in Brewing – Japanese Beer Concoctions

Hey, no one’s perfect and we at American Craft Beer.com understand that better than anyone, having enthusiastically acted on more bad ideas than we care to think about. That said, there are some ideas out there that are so monumentally bad and so misguided as to boggle the mind, allowing us to proclaim that “at least we didn’t come up with that!” So welcome to another edition of our continuing series – BAD IDEAS IN BREWING – and we’re blaming Japan for these awful ideas.

Extra Cold Beer

Here’s a great idea – let’s just freeze the shit out of the beer until you can barely taste it and then maybe throw in a lime as a back-up.

This experiment began back in 2010, when Asahi started chilling its Super Dry beer close to the freezing point (about 28 degrees Fahrenheit) and serving it at a temporary bar in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district. This extra-cold specially chilled brew (so cold it essentially limited whatever flavors the beer might have originally had) proved so popular that Asahi brought it back and increased the number of Extra Cold Bars to eight that summer.

The WSJ reported that “Asahi has also installed special equipment at 5,500 restaurants and bars across Japan for making the super-chilled beer.” Kirin countered by opening their “ownbeer gardens serving Ichiban Shibori Frozen Draft beer” and doubled down on its commitment to bad taste by topping it off with a previously discussed “Bad Idea In Brewing” favorite – Soft-Serve Head.

 

Beer Cocktails

Here’s another great Japanese beer idea …Let’s sex up the brew to ensure that it no longer looks or even tastes like beer by dousing it with fruity mixers and layering it with so many different flavors that it looks like a Shirley Temple birthday party frappe.

Wall Street Journal reporter, Hiroyuki Kachi, details this deeply disturbing new Japanese brewing trend:

“Kirin is selling 12 cocktails featuring its Ichiban Shibori beer, leavened with mixers like pineapple, grapefruit or tomato juice, as well as cassis or lemon liqueur. The company calls them Ichiban Shibori Two-Tone Drafts, for the layers of color created in the glass before the beer and mixers are stirred.”

 

Stop The Madness!

Hey, we’ve a suggestion that Japanese brewers might want to consider before they proceed further down this road to madness. If you really want to resuscitate your brand – BREW BETTER BEER!

Perhaps you wouldn’t be losing market share if you were crafting a core product that people actually enjoyed drinking. Beer frozen to tastelessness or flavored out of its mind and layered into something all together different only makes sense when:

(1) The beer you’re drinking totally blows and it has to be disguised at all costs.

(2) You never wanted a real beer to begin with and were really looking to drink something more like a margarita or a frappe.

Bottom Line

Cryogenically frozen beers are deadened beers and if tastelessness is what you’re going for – well then congratulations, you’ve nailed it. And drinking madly flavored layered concoctions is not the same as drinking beer – even if a brewery is behind them.

What’s going on in Japan is disturbing and inherently anti-beer… and both are profound examples of BAD IDEAS IN BREWING.