Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 120mm
2 sec, f/8, ISO 100 — full exif
(photo setup described here)
Japanese Beer du Jour

The Japanese beer market is both interesting and frustrating.

Prior to twenty years ago the few major breweries all produced a few rich beers that were all more or less the same type of beer available since after the war. After WWII the Japanese people suffered greatly, food-wise, so rich lager beer emerged as a way a man could indulge himself, and thus “Japanese Beer” was set in stone for the better part of two generations.

That all changed in 1987 when Asahi Brewery's “Super Dry” was released on the market. If I remember the story I read not long after, a new beer was considered a smashing success if it sold a million cases in its first year. Super Dry sold something like 18 million in its first nine months. It's a clean, crisp, light taste, and appealed very much to the “not your father's beer” flush-with-cash generation of the late-80s bubble economy.

The late 80s and early 90s was an amazing time of awakening in Japan. When I first arrived in 1989 (to work at Omron Tateishi Denki in Nagaokakyou), 39 out of 40 cars in the parking lot were white. By the time I left eight years later, a boom of cultural individualism had resulted in the mix becoming decidedly more colorful, and today, white is not at all a preferred color for cars.

Anyway, the entire beverage market also experienced a cultural awakening, and these days, varieties come and go with the wind (such as this example from the can coffee market that I wrote about last year).

With beer, each brewer has a few “tenant lines,” but 2/3rd of the beer aisle are varieties that come and go in a few months. I think that the churn is mostly due to an attempt to capture the attention of the consumer with “new!” and “improved!” (it may well be that the exact same beer is inside all the differently-labeled cans ), although some of the churn is also of a seasonal nature.

The image at right is from some of my research for this post, Kirin's seasonal Akiaji (“Autumn Taste”) beer. With a can this pretty, the taste must be good.

I just don't get the timing of the marketing, though. According to the beer's blog it'll be on the market through the end of this month^*1, but the fall foliage season won't start in most of Japan for another six weeks after that. (For example, I didn't have any foliage pictures on my blog last year until mid November's Kyoto Autumn Foliage (Sort Of) post.)

And therein lies the frustration in the Japanese beer market. I'm reluctant to try a new beer for fear of liking it, because I know that if I do, it'll be yanked out from under me a few months later.

I'll have to consider this post a work in progress, as I believe there's much more research yet to be done. In fact, I think I'll go open another can of research right now....

^*1 Yes, the specific beer has its own blog. This is Japan, you know.