The Best Sake Daiginjyo Manotsuru. Well, that’s what it says on the box.

As a regular traveller to Sado ga Shima (Sado Island) in the Niigata prefecture, on my last trip, I was fortunate enough to drop by the Obata Sake Brewery.

The Best Sake Daiginjyo Manotsuru

A day trip to Yokohama is not complete without a trip to the Kirin Brewery Yokohama. The brewery is located in Namamugi, which is a short hop from the Yokohama city centre.

The tour of the Kirin Brewery was practically the same as the tour of the Asahi Brewery Osaka, just interchange the word ‘Asahi’ for ‘Kirin’ in the beer tour template and voilà – you have yourself a tour.

All was not bad however. We did get two free beers at the end. Furthermore, as Kirin means giraffe in Japanese, I learnt that the strange animal on the Kirin Ichiban label is a drawing of what Japanese thought a giraffe looked like in earlier times. Mind you, they had never seen a giraffe (apparently/hopefully) and were drawing only what had been described to them.

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On a recent trip to Osaka we headed to Nishinomiya for a tour of the Asahi brewery there. The brewery was about a 15 minute walk from the Nishinomiya Station on the JR Kobe Line. Guided by Asahi’s public relations staff, the tour started with a display of the raw materials used to brew beer: malted barley, hops, water and yeast. We were able to sift our hands through the grain samples. This was followed by an overview of the 5 steps to making beer: processing the barley (malting), the mashing process, the fermentation and maturation processes, the filtration process, and finally the bottling and canning processes.

Asahi Brewery in Nishinomiya, Osaka

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