Sapporo Yebisu

Brewed by Sapporo Breweries
Style: Pale Lager
Tokyo, Japan

Tough to get excited here. Fairly standard macro lager. Stale / corn-liek malts run though the nose and palate. Definately has a sweet adjunct edge. Finishes quite dry and long.

Typical Japanese lager. Quite refreshing, far from offensive but totally uninspiring. Sampled from a bottle at a Japanese restaurant in the city.

veyr light and golden, nice round sweetness and strong hop bitterness for this style. hop aroma is almost a little citrus / mint

Deep gold with a fluffy white head. Aroma of cereal grains, some apple and very modest hops. Flavour is possibly a little heavy in sweetness for the style but not entirely offensive. Not a whole lot going on.

This tastes just like a dodgy pale lager, with none of the bready malt that I would expect from a Dortmunder. It was malty, but it was all sweet and hollow and a bit sickly. Some harsh bitterness, again with no real depth to support it. Rather unimpressive.

Bottled, sampled at Haket, Göteborg. Pale golden colour. Creamy white head. Rich malty nose, along with pooh. Light malty in flavour, with some sweetness and low bitterness. Not very nice, hence the pooh in the background.

(Bottle) Pours golden. Sweet and grainy aroma with tones of rice and some wet mash. Sweet and light hoppy flavour with notes of grass and rice. Light bitter with a dry ending. Some honey tones both in the aroma and in the flavour. Light bodied.

It is interesting, and somewhat incongruous I think that Japanese restaurants don’t serve finer beers than this. Alas, until the early 1990s microbrewing beer in Japan was all but prohibited. So, we get the "Big 4": Suntory, Kirin, Asahi, and Sapporo-- lagers all. I miss ale. That said, these, lighter beers still seem very heavy alongside most Japanese cuisine. With sashimi and sushi, I think that sake is almost always a better bet than beer. This beer was on tap at a restaurant in Kyoto which served excellent Japanese food, but I have to admit the beer just didn’t fit the bill. Compared to the rest of the Japanese macro lager cosmos, however, this is probably near the top. It is crisp with a lively palate the hops come with a little sour tinge which is unattractive.