Before we continue, I need to give you a brief explanation of Japanese alcohol law. I have hinted that we were focusing on standard, mid-priced beer to begin with and that there were other, premium varieties available. Happily this is true, and I look forward to sampling some of the finer things as we go up in the world.
Equally there is a steep drop in price with the budget options available to us. Japanese law only classes a product as beer if it is at least half fermented malt. Products containing less than this are classed as happoushu and are taxed less as a result. On the lowest level are those which use a complete substitute, often being subsequently fortified with a malt spirit. Essentially for all these non-beers, the breweries come up with ever-more elaborate ways get round the tax rules while still producing something drinkable. They end up costing so much less than ‘real’ beer, that even the purist starts to get curious and learns to ignore the ingredients (pea protein, anyone?), so we can’t ignore them.
If it weren’t for the arbitrary classification of alcohol in Japanese law, none of these bizarre drinks would exist. Maybe none of them should. Fortunately for the Japanese brewers, the current isolationist policies of CAMRA make overseas operations unlikely in the foreseeable future. In any event, common ground and eventually a truce could probably be made based solely on the fact that Japanese law also does not class plenty of American import ‘beers’ as ‘beer’ at all.
Konbini Beer 