Monday, October 22, 2007

About Alcohol

You may have heard of Japanese beer. In the civilized world Japanese beer is sold in supermarkets. One can find at least Asahi super-dry and Sapporo beer all around the world. But a thing I realized lately is that in fact Japanese whiskey might be more popular around the world than the beer.
Many of you might have seen the movie Lost in Translation where one of the main characters played by Bill Murray came into Tokyo to create an advertisement for Suntory Whiskey. Indeed I have even seen extremely expensive Japanese whiskey being sold in Finland.

My city Aobadai happens to have an excellent alcohol shop (Yamaya, one of the closest shops of any kind to my dorm). They have imports from all around the world, great beers and wines and not just alcohol but also tea and vegetable juice, snacks and so on.
So today inspired by the above mentioned movie and some impulsive shopping I ended buying a bottle of Suntory Whiskey (along with some other stuff), although I'm not really a fan of whiskey. There were many many different kinds of whiskey, so I had a hard time picking one. I finally picked a generic looking Suntory whiskey that they had a whole shelf full of. This one was supposed to be creamy and soft tasting. Indeed you could probably call it that. Feel welcome to come have a taste.


My collection from left: Suntory Whisky, Singha (Thai-beer), Beer-imitation (発泡酒 Happoshu), Korean Chamisuru, Sake (日本酒), Plum wine (梅酒).
My collection is missing one important item, Shochu 焼酎, which is a bit stronger drink that Japanese Sake made from wheat, potatoe or almost anything else. It is apparently more popular in Japan than Sake, since at least bars have very big menus of different kinds of Shochu.
(Orange bottle in the background is vegetable juice, one cup of it contains all necessary vitamins for one day :O )



My first Thai-beer


Some bottle art
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1 comment:

Zhongguo-Youth said...

I'm rather interested in finnish brewage recently.