Two beers here--they look the same but are in fact totally different. The top, Yebisu Amber, is a seasonal beer. It went on sale yesterday. It's got Yebisu's trademark bracing clarity but is fuller and bitterer than standard (gold label) Yebisu or (green label) The Hop. I really like the new can design. Minimalist elegance.


The bottom beer is brewed by a small company in Saitama. Saitama is the prefecture directly to the north of Tokyo. Sometimes you hear it called the New Jersey of Japan. Convenient, most likely full of hidden attractions (did you know that there are more bear sightings per mile of the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey than in any other state?), but largely forgotten in the shadow of its much larger and more glamorous neighbor. In fact, some less-charitable folks call it DaSaitama, a pun that combines the prefecture's name with the word dasai which can be translated as "uncool" or possibly "frumpy". (Contrast this with Ebisu, the swanky part of Tokyo where Yebisu's parent Sapporo Beer has its headquarters.) Despite its unfashionable provenance, Coedo beer is very good (and comes in a good-looking bottle). There are four or five brews, differentiated, like Chimay, by color. In the shop by our house you can find blue, black, and red. The blue label is a light pilsner, the black label a stout, and the red label an amber lager. The red, called beniaka in Japanese, is brewed with sweet potatoes which give it a distictive sweet, almost heavy flavor, better perhaps after dinner than with food. The company has a cool website. The text is in Japanese, but it's easy to navigate by graphics alone. Here's the address: http://www.coedobrewery.com/swf/index.html