Walk into a bar in Copenhagen’s trendy Nørrebro neighborhood and one expects to find the occasional Danish craft beer alongside the standard Carlsberg and Tuborg offerings. In Tokyo, Kirin and Asahi mainly go over the bar, while Shanghai bars offer only Tsingtao and Snow. So no one would blame a visitor for double-taking at bottles [...]
From Asia to North America and Europe, Japanese brewer Toshi Ishii is quietly spreading the message of craft beer across the globe. When I reach Ishii, the Chief Operating Officer and Brewmaster for the YoHo Brewing Company brewer, he is in London enjoying his third appearance at the Great British Beer Festival and preparing another [...]
Continue reading about A Japanese Brewing Rock Star – The Toshi Ishii Profile…
When American brewers sneezed, craft fever slowly spread around the globe. While influential brewers in Germany, Belgium, Britain, and the Czech Republic created the grand brewing traditions that underlie so much of modern brewing, these brewers have been slow to break outside of the safety of their traditions. A quarter of a century after a [...]
Amidst the stream of recent posts elsewhere about the results of the bi-annual World Beer Cup, held in conjunction this year with the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, California, was a little reported story about how big craft beer is growing on an international scale. About a year ago, I spent a few weeks [...]
Continue reading about Japan Wins Big at 2008 World Beer Cup…
Last May, I spent three weeks traveling around to various destinations in Japan. On my trip, I had the opportunity to witness first-hand the country’s impressive ascendancy into the global craft beer scene. The country boasts more than 200 craft breweries (as many as 280 by some accounts), which, in a show of just how [...]
Give and Take…