A little bit of design: Sapporo Lager Beer

Sapporo have put out a few retro beer can designs this year, along with what (I think) is a different kind of lager beer than the standard black label they put out at the moment. The last one I saw was alright, but this new one is a really nice piece of design:


Needless to say that this would be my beer of choice all the time if it were widely available in this can. Not that I put design before flavour or anything... And as a last throw away line, I do much prefer drinking beer from 330ml cans than from the 500ml cans that are standard for beer in the UK.

Field Recordings 2 - Sapporo Beer Garden 2008

So in serious news Prime Minister Fukuda resigned suddenly yesterday. I spoke to a few people, and from what I can tell it seems that no-one expected it, and although he was pretty unpopular, people don't like the fact that he just quit like that, it feels kinda like he... left the country in the lurch? Something like that. Some people are pretty happy though, I'm sure. It was a real shock especially since he reshuffled his cabinet last month, but Abe quit after a similarly positive move...

Anyway, y'know what doesn't bring in the hits? POLITICS. Y'know what does? BEER! At least that's what I'm banking on with this, my second field recording, taken at Sapporo's crazy drinking festival Beer Garden 2008! I'm sure I wrote about this a lot already, but Beer Garden is a huge sprawling outdoor beer drinking extravaganza across Odori Park for about a month every summer. I went down on the first night, and between getting pretty much tanked, I walked the whole length, from the German Beer Garden to the Suntory Premium Malts Garden clutching a digital recorder as I went.



It's 15 minutes long, so the 192kbps version is a pretty hefty 21 megs. Still you can download it right here, and the main Internet Archive page for it in different sizes and formats is here.

And here are the notes:

00.00 - It starts off with Japanese people singing German beer songs around West 9 or 10, the German Beer Garden. At this end things were pretty calm and restrained, people sitting around and enjoying the music and the beer.

Between here and 06.00 I was walking past the International Beer Garden (I don't remember which brands) which seems to have been deadly quiet, and the area of grass and slides where parents had left their children to fend for themselves while they went off to get trolleyed. I'm KIDDING!

06.00 - Sapporo Beer Garden. The home brand patch was packed, and looked something like this:


But it wasn't all that crazy.

08.00 - The Kirin Beer Garden on the other hand was off the hook. Hear someone dropping something! A bunch of tanked guys jumping up and down screaming "NUMBER ONE!" Crowd pleasing sing along numbers! This was actually where my friends were sitting - conversation was difficult...


11.00 Asahi Beer Garden was less crazy, but still a pretty big party. They had the big bandstand as a stage so they could easily entertain the crowd, it was packed:


13.00 - After that we hike on to the last garden, Suntory: The Premium Malts Garden. This place was pretty cool, but not exactly as "pumping" as Asahi or Kirin.

There you go, now you just need to go get drunk and spend 15 minutes listening to that on your ipod while you walk though a balmy summer evening and you might as well have been there yourself.

I'm too good to you.

Bikers, Beer and Bears

When I say I live in Sapporo, I really mean that I live in Asabu. Sapporo is the city, like Birmingham, Asabu is the Suburb, like Moseley. Asabu is at the end of one of the subway lines, but really it only takes about fifteen minutes to get back into town. It's not that far out.

But late at night we have biker gangs tearing through the streets of Asabu causing... perhaps a little havoc? I'm not sure. I saw a couple of young hoods riding motorbikes one night while I was walking along with Tara. She described them as wannabe yakuza and was particularly scornful. They were pretty awesome in a pathetic way. Anyway I presume they were part of this big biker gang that you can hear at night, and whose main weapon is driving incredibly slowly while revving their steroid pumped engines as hard as possible. I live near the main road and it sounds, I have to admit, pretty awesome. It's only once a week, but they put on a hell of an aural display. They woke me up one night and I thought for a second that one of them had snuck his "hog" through my window and fired it up right by my head. Seriously, it can't be good for their engines, but I guess it's a hobby. I'm going to try and record it so that I can share the power, the majesty of loud Japanese motorcycles with all of you.

Tara's boyfriend Fred is here to stay for a while, and since she works on Saturday and I don't, he and I headed down to the Sapporo Beer museum (not the shopping mall this time) to be educated in the ways of beer. Like I've said, I think Sapporo is a fine, fine beer, and Fred is a healthy, broad shouldered American who likes beer so it was a pretty easy choice to make.

The museum is free too look around, you just pay to drink the beer at the end, and frankly you don't pay very much. It also tastes fantastic there, crisp and fresh, indeed as if it had just been brewed. The musem isn't very big, but the whole area is full of nice old red brick buildings, and it was fun inside for what it was so I'd say it's definitely worth a visit. If you like beer.

Probably the most surreal thing inside was the tiny Willy Wonka-esque diorama of the brewing process. It was acted out by tiny, white, cone-monkey people and each step was encased in a large perspex tank to stop people from touching it. Now I'm not a qualified brew-master, but I don't think it was all that historically accurate seeing as it started with an old man living on a cloud at the top of a beanstalk, involved a river of beer (that flowed up hill at one point) and finished with the old man basking on the fluffy head of a giant mug of glowing Sapporo. Or maybe that's how they used to do it in the olden days?

The last scene from the ridiculous Sapporo museum brewing story. "I'm the king of beer!"

More bears! These ones guard a jewelery shop in Tanuki Kouji. Grrr!

Juice of Bear

Originally posted on facebook on 14th August:

In the guides I had read it sounded like Sapporo Beer had a big complex in this city where the factory museum and beer garden had sort of expanded into a shopping mall and general entertainment suplex. This is not quite the case. There are actually two different locations, the old factory which is now the Sapporo museum and beer garden (apparently great for lots of free samples and cheap beer at the end), and the new complex, called the Sapporo Factory, which is a sort of family SUPER MALL. I don’t really mind malls, but building a huge building with lots of shops is not something that ranks all that high on the scale of human achievements for me, so I could take it or leave it. Certainly the size was pretty impressive, and I got a bit turned around and lost a few times, and the shops showed a strange slant towards outdoor pursuits, and there were wind turbine things (that since they were located indoors, must’ve gobbled up electricity instead of producing it, making them slightly chilling mockeries of real wind turbines), and there was a Sapporo Beer Keller, but in the end it was just a big mall. The concession to the “factory” was a sort of mini demo brewery that I’m ashamed to say I didn’t check out except to see some guys hefting metal barrels through an open doorway. It’s not that big though, so I somehow doubt that all that beer is brewed there. It’s probably not brewed at the old factory either coz it’s a museum now… so where is it brewed? My guess: either at some massive factory in the wilds of Hokkaido that’s staffed by bears, or perhaps… Belgium? So, I didn’t visit the Sapporo Museum, I visited the Sapporo Mall. Not all that great, but that doesn’t detract in the slightest from what a great beer they make. I had a can tonight with dried squid from Hakodate whilst watching SMAPXSMAP. It RULED, except that SMAPXSMAP was a clip show and sort of sucked. The beer and squid RULED though!

But, but, but on a whim, and since the day had been all blue skies and searing heat again I headed up the JR Tower, Sapporo’s obligatory tall-building-with-observation-floor (actually Sapporo also has the TV tower, but that isn’t meant to be as good). Oh my god! So worth it! So beautiful! Sunset over the mountains, turning the sea red! You can see the sea from there! It looks so close, I estimated where I lived to the North of Sapporo and started thinking “surely I can walk to the sea from my house!” (I’m pretty sure that I can do no such thing). The neon walls of downtown, the Sapporo Factory, even that absurd Ferris Wheel on top of a building looks awesome all lit up. If you come to visit me I WILL take you up there, and I can only imagine how cool everything looks in the snow.

I also found a couple of import food deli places which stock lots of American brands and a few British ones too. Nothing to get too excited about really, then again I’m not sure if I would have got that excited about anything since I’m not really craving any products that I can’t get here. Maybe some Reece’s stuff? Anyway one of the shops was in the Sapporo Factory complex which is a little out of the way and I don’t imagine I’ll be going back soon; while the other one is in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath Sapporo Station. Above ground Sapporo is super easy to navigate around, below ground… well I may never see that place again. I have no idea where I was in relation to anywhere else when I found it, I had certainly never been there before and may never be there again. I love this place.

In other news, I bought a guitar! So probably no proper camera for a while, you'll have to make do with these shonky phone pics. They would be better too, but I can't transfer them straight onto computer via USB (probably to do with the Japanese driver) I have to resize them and email them from my phone to my gmail. Oh well.

"So first of all what we do is we lure the bear into a clearing, somwhere quiet, then we send in Big Kenichi. Big Kenichi, he hates bears somethin' awful ever since one stole his pic-er-nic basket when he was a youngling. So the bear starts all gripin' and growlin', but Big Kenichi just strolls up and punches that big ol' bear so hard that it straight up evapourates. So we suck up the bear vapour, run it through a condenser and ship it down to Sapporo. The white bear juice is a bit trickier, we have to filter that stuff but good to get all the brown out of it."

I probably should have bought some of this, I have no idea what it was. More on bears soon, they feature pretty heavily up here.

Welcome to Beer Garden

Originally posted on facebook on 5th August:

Hey, you know what else? The underground in Sapporo is awesome too! On some of the trains you can see the wheel-arches curving just above the level　of the platform, and the trains seem to run on huge rubber tyres! They are pretty quiet on their approach, but when you`re on them the noise from the open windows gets deafening. But even this isn`t so bad because there are no doors between carriages, just big stretched hexagon gaps bridged by metal panels and thick, corrugated rubber; which means that when the train is quiet you can see all the way from end of the train to the other and watch it curling away as you turn a corner. This, plus the tyres means that the tube in Sapporo is kind of like a giant bendy-bus hurtling through a tiny tunnel, deep underground.

Today I went for lunch at a macrobiotic restaurant, good work that was immediately undone by a huge ice cream and perhaps a "flagon" or "tankard" of Sapporo Black at Beer Garden.

Beer Garden is a summer festival here in Sapporo that stretches down Odori Park, a huge segmented public space that runs horizontally across the city. In the winter the Snow Festival is held here, in summer - Beer Garden! Each of Japan`s major breweries has a chunk of park the length of a block and they create huge outdoor beer gardens, in a festival that is less about different sorts of beer than it is about just drinking lots and lots of the stuff. At least in that way it`s more honest than most beer festivals. Today we went to the Sapporo Beer Garden because one of my party was captivated by what we at first thought were children cavorting onstage in cow costumes. I hope they weren`t kids because at the end of the routine the compere woman bounded to the front of the stage, tankards of Sapporo were distributed and they all swug mightily to a rousing "Kampai!" Other entertainment included some guys from a town where they grow melons giving away melons to people whos birthday it was, and a prize draw. You could buy a fish cake in the shape of Hokkaido, though I was pretty daunted by my medium sized jug of beer already, so I passed. The Kirin beer garden was the most lively, as we walked back through there a gravelly voice was booming from the tannoy, leading the crowd in a sing-a-long. Each company had a different giant pitcher thing for groups, mostly in the shape of a keg or something, but Kirin had huge, terrifying perspex towers. Asahi was packed but a bit dull looking. They did have a series of hawaiian dance acts however! And Suntory was pretty lacklustre to be honest, no-one seemed to be having any fun there.

Famillies are welcome at Beer Garden, lots and lots of kids were running around, none of them even seemed interested in sneaking beer from their folks. I think when you`re a kid beer`s pretty gross really. Also it was run with spectacular efficiency: we sat down, one girl sold us beer tickets from a huge usherette`s tray, another girl then scooped up these tickets and went to get our beers. Servings were, as you might have figured, generous.

I also had a bit of a tour of downtown Sapporo this weekend, and learnt that in the winter I can pretty much catch the train to Sapporo and do all my shopping in one of the many underground malls and complexes without ever having to brave the snow and the -10C winds except between my flat and the train station at my end.

Also I can confirm, for at least one person`s benefit, Americans do love both tacos AND freedom.