"Happoshu" - Softer on the wallet, if not on the head

Like many other peoples of the world, the Japanese enjoy having a beer. They enjoy beer so much in fact that the Japanese government decided to increase taxes on it in part to protect more traditional beverages such as nihonshu. This is why any product labeled as biiru costs two or three times as much in Japan as it does in many other countries.

In Japan, a product is classified as beer if malt makes up at least 67% of its fermentable ingredients. To escape the heavy beer tax threatening their bottom lines, the beer manufacturers began lowering the amount of malt in their drinks, substituting rice or other fermentable substances. The resulting beverage looks and tastes close enough to beer for many people, but escapes the heavier beer tax bracket. However, since it is not legally beer anymore, it can't say biiru on the can. Instead, it is called happoshu, which literally means "sparkling alcohol."

If you watch much Japanese television at all, you're bound to encounter the numerous advertisements promoting this or that happoshu product. None of them advertise their non-beer status directly however, preferring instead to focus on various celebrities enjoying their brew in a party-like atmosphere. And the one word that these commercials repeat over and over is nama, a word that when used with beer means "draught." Invariably, almost every new product uses this word in its name (shin nama, gubi nama, etc.), in what seems to be an obvious attempt to cover over the fact that it isn't actually beer that's being sold.

Whether this brushing over of the details is actually working or people just prefer to spend less than 1000yen for a six pack of something that's close enough to beer isn't clear, but either way happoshu continues to sell well. The shelf space allotted to actual beer appears to be decreasing as more space is made available for the constant flow of new happoshus.

Taste is an endlessly arguable point no matter what is being consumed (witness natto and umeboshi), but many people will tell you that happoshu does not taste as good as real beer. This may be one reason that most restaurants only server actual beer. That intagible aspect aside, one physical difference between beer and happoshu is the kind of alcohol present in the drink. Happoshu tends to contain more fusel alcohols, a type of alcohol that helps produce that hangover you wake up with after drinking a bit too much the previous evening. In the end, the choice between driking beer or happoshu may come down to whether you prefer to pay for your alcohol consumption in extra money upfront or extra headaches the next day.

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