Pat's Pints

After an extended hiatus, the All Things Beer Podcast is back with an episode about two idiosyncratic German styles – Berliner Weisse and Gose. We are joined by Ryan Torres, Brewmaster at Brew Brothers and longtime lover of sour beers. Although they originated in different parts of Germany, these two sessionable, sour wheat beers have a lot in common. We trac...

In my travels around Japan I was impressed with the overall quality of the beer I found. However, the density of small breweries is nowhere near what you would find in the US and many other western countries. It’s hard to get an exact figure but the number of beer breweries in Japan is on the order of 600-800, which is not that many for a country of 120 million people. This r...

Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto, is on the itinerary of most foreigners who visit Japan and with good reason. The city is steeped in history, religion, and traditional Japanese culture. It was the spiritual and sometimes political center of Japan from the 8th century, when Emperor Kammu moved the capital from Nara to Kyoto, until the 19th century when the young Emperor Meiji l...

With a population of 2.8 million, Osaka is Japan’s third largest city and effectively the nation’s second largest urban center.  A visit to Osaka affords you the opportunity to drink craft beer in a former public bath/onsen (Kamigata Beer), in a skyscraper 31 floors abo...

I’m currently in the middle of a 3 month stay in Japan. It’s an incredible opportunity, so I’ve doing my best to explore all that Japan has to offer. Naturally that includes checking out local breweries and other beery spots of interest when the opportunity presents itself. In my last post I made some general observations about the beer scene in Japan. In this post and an und...