Zero / Zero Happōshu

Wow, what a day. We tested four no sugar/no purine (whatever that is) happōshu (low malt beer). Three of them came out on September 2, while the fourth one from Sapporo was launched a couple months earlier. Actually it was upgraded from new genre after the tax people figured out that Sapporo misidentified its product which enabled the brew to qualify for a lower tax bracket.* But nevermind all that tax talk, let's get to the testing part. Miki and Józsi were so kind to help me taste the four products which ranged in flavor from chewing gum through bitter medicine to non-alcoholic beer. After the first two, Miki said that he had enough of this crap and refused to try the other two. Józsi and I decided to keep going and try all of them. Our conclusion was that they not only taste like something other than beer, but they taste like more or less the same product sold under different brands. Anyways, we abandoned our initial plan to rank these beers and decided give them zeros which should not be all that bad in terms of evaluation since we are talking about 0/0 beers.

 

* You can read about this issue here in more detail.