If you have any interest in beer and an hour or so to kill, you could certainly do worse than checking out the Kirin Brewery in Yokohama, which is about a half hour train ride from Tokyo.
For one thing, you can’t beat the price: it’s absolutely free, and they give you a bunch of beer to sample.
The biggest issue is that they don’t do any tours in English — it’s all Japanese. They do, however, give you a little booklet at the beginning of the tour with most of the info in English. It’s essentially like subtitles that you can carry around with you, though it was clearly a condensed version of what’s being said in Japanese.
Still, it’s a decently informative tour, and it’s brisk enough that it never feels boring, even with the language gap.
It’s also unlike a lot of the bigger brewery tours in that it’s an actual, in-use brewery (many of the bigger companies use a converted brewery that’s exclusively used for tours). You get to see a bit of the production process from behind glass, which is actually quite interesting.
And then, of course, there’s the beer itself. At the end of the tour you get to sample three different beers: a lager, a stout, and a premium lager. I quite enjoyed the two lagers. The stout, on the other hand, tasted like Guinness if you removed 90 percent of its flavour and body. It wasn’t great.
Still, it was free! And the glasses were surprisingly generous — probably about half a pint each. I may have gotten a little bit drunk (okay fine, I was extremely drunk). They also gave everyone a small pack of peanuts and rice crackers, and a bonus can of beer as we were leaving. It’s so generous that it’s honestly kind of bizarre.
Location: 1 Chome-17-1 Namamugi, Tsurumi-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa-ken 230-8628
How to find it: Once you get close, there are signs pointing the way. You can’t miss it.