Kirin loses its head
BY:FRED PAWLE From: The Australian July 29, 2013 2:16PM
THE urge to embellish beer used to be understandable. Beers were essentially local phenomena, and unless you travelled beyond your county in Britain or state in Australia, the taste became pretty boring after a decade or so.
In the 1980s, adventurous beer drinkers weighed up the benefits of a little variety against the inevitable questions about one’s sexual preference before adding a dash of lime syrup to a schooner or middie. It was either that or confirm one’s sexual ambiguity altogether by ordering wine. At the other end of the spectrum, tough guys dropped a shot of whisky or vodka into a beer, known as a depth charge.
But the beer revolution changed all that. As the number and variety of craft brewers grew, the need to invent one’s own new ways of appreciating beer diminished.
Beers are so varied now that, as The Australian’s beer critic Peter Lalor explained here last week, a variety of beer can be reinvented annually, and fans will revisit it with renewed curiosity.
Japanese beer lovers, however, are yet to discover the secret of reinventing brews. They are still stuck in the 20th century habit of adding syrups to them. Sadly, this is actually being encouraged by Kirin, one of the country’s two leading brewers.
In a video released on Youtube recently, Kirin demonstrates the technical prowess required in adding its Ichiban Shibori premium beer to syrup to create a two-tone effect. It’s about as complex as burning toast, although most likely with worse gustatory results.
The intention is apparently to attract younger and more feminine drinkers to beer, the concept of creating a sweeter brew specifically for these demographics obviously having not occurred to the Kirin boffins.
Kirin has form in this department. A couple of years ago it started making dispensers that placed a frozen icecream-like head on a beer. It too was made from Ichiban Shibori, and did little to endear the brew to anybody with a hard-earned thirst to quench.
Danielle Allen, of Australia’s Two Birds Brewing, says that beer embellishment is, with the exception of some performed during the brewing process, mostly the work of philistines.
“I’m not really into it (adding syrup to beer),” she says. “But that’s because I’m a beer girl, and I enjoy craft beers. They have all these awesome things going on.”
