Asahi Brewery Tour, Nagoya

Beautiful view from the beginning of the tour

So it's a weekday noon in Nagoya, you're already done for the day. You're having lunch and enjoying a glass of draft beer, you know, the usual. You scramble for ideas on how else you should be spending the rest of the afternoon because you've recently embraced the carpe diem-motto. What do you do?


Well, I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'll do you one better and tell you what we did. You see, all it takes is some ingenuity, 3G for mobile information access and a thirst only fresh beer can quench.

Having booked a bit late, I was already betting against the hopes of getting slots for an English tour. To save you the suspense, we got everything we wanted and more out of a Thursday afternoon.

We arrived at the brewery a quarter past schedule which caused me a slight heart-attack because tardiness and Japan are quite alien to each other. However upon entry, a couple of fresh, friendly (not to mention giddy) faces greeted us with HUGE smiles. And us luck would have it, turns out we were the only ones booked for that afternoon's English tour. SCORE!

A quick intro of ourselves to our guide, Rina (love her), we commence the 75-minute tour of the land of dreams. And I will probably sound defensive but I did learn a few things from the tour. I mean, I wasn't just there for the beer tasting after. I mean. What.

• The Nagoya brewery, though isn't Asahi's biggest, is pretty ginormous. It's like the size of 3 baseball fields or something like that. Yeah.
• If you had to drink 1 glass of beer each day to finish one silver tank (photo below), don't. It will take you like over a million of days. Don't we all wish we could be immortals.
• Beer is basically made from hops, barley, water and sugar. I'm pretty sure I'm missing one thing (yeast?) for the Asahi beers but I'm certain the four I mentioned are legit ingredients as I remember them from the XXXX Brewery Tour I took in Brisbane.
• Asahi Superdry is the greatest beer in the world and I didn't need to see the brewery to know that. I just thought a little verbal diarrhoea was in order.

And that is how a ditzy teenager would give a class presentation of her Thursday afternoon with a trip to the guidance counselor shortly after because why was she at a brewery in the first place?

I'm a perpetual believer of happy endings and there's really no better way of ending a tour than a tasting. It says online that you're in for a 75 minute tour and a 20 minute tasting after. However the tour felt rather quick and short and perhaps it was because despite the constant Q and A we had with Rina (that largely wasn't about Asahi), it was actually very interesting. The machines they use to process and package the beers were more than fascinating. Aaahhh, Japan does want it all.

I love how our table was decked with a cute "welcome" sign and some otsumami, too!

Had they included a "comments and suggestions" portion of the tour, I would've asked that they make the tasting window shorter but with an all-you-can-drink leeway. But life, though beautiful, is not perfect. Instead you get 20 precious minutes to enjoy 3 beers if you can. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! We tasted or rather skulled the Asahi Dark and the Asahi Superdry (twice, you know, for research purposes) and wow. There's truly nothing like fresh beer from the tap. 

Here we are getting cosy with our tour guide, Rina. She was so nice and takes good pictures, too!

Oh you will see me again, for sure!

With a bit of a buzz and a couple of beer bellies to lug back to the station with us, we left the brewery happy and content. And how could we not? Not only was it a knowledgeable and delicious afternoon but also FREE. Yes, the entire afternoon and the beers have zero charge. They're just happy to share because they care.

I would highly recommend for tourists, beer patrons and jaded individuals alike to go on the Asahi tour. They have breweries in all the major cities in Japan, the Osaka Brewery being the biggest so it won't take you to head down to my neck of woods. 

Deets:

• Daily from 10:00 ~ 16:00 / tours starts on the hour on weekdays and every 30 mins on weekends. Closed 29th Dec ~ 4th Jan
• For english tours call 052-408-2000
• Also, don't bother going by car (or don't bother going at all if you're under 20) if you plan on going on the tasting as Japan has a tight DUI rule. Otherwise, unlimited soft drinks from the Asahi group of companies are on offer, too. 
• 452-8562 Kiyosu-Shi, Teranohanagasa 100 (about a 15 minute walk from the Moriyama station)

All this beer talk is giving me ideas. It is Friday after all... and I am on my second glass of wine...