tokyo food file

seasonal brews 1: Oiso Kotatsu-Mikan Belgian White & Sake-kasu Golden Ale

There's no better way to welcome in early spring than with some good seasonal brews and eats...

Down in Fujisawa, at Komazawa Shuzo's Mokichi Craft Beer, we sipped on Shonan Beers's early-spring special, Oiso Kotatsu-Mikan Belgian White (that's the pint on the right; the one on the left is the year-round IPA.)

The mikan in the ale are mandarin oranges — the kind you nibble on as you sit around the kotatsu heater in winter — grown on a farm in Oiso, Kanagawa Pref., which is just down the road from the brewery. The fruit adds just a light citrus buzz, nothing too sharp or acidic, so it doesn't overpower the food...

 

Which included a salad with hamaguri clams, strips of udo and nanohana greens...

 

…as well as deep-fried new-season bamboo shoots with batter-fried morsels of kasago scorpion fish — an ale batter, of course — on a tasty sauce americaine. 

 

Shonan Beer is producing some excellent new brews these days. We also tried this little number (on the right): Sake-kasu Golden Ale. It's produced with the addition of some sake lees — what's left after the sake is pressed — giving the ale a slightly more complex yeast profile. Intriguing indeed.

The brew on the left is the real ale chocolate porter. Also excellent.

 

I posted about Mokichi Craft Beer last year here...

And many moons back I wrote a column about the Komazawa brewery in my Japan Times column... Well worth the day trip!

 

the King Billy — worth crossing town for

"Worth crossing the street for" is usually considered a recommendation. With our old local we always used to cross the road to avoid having to walk past all the crusties and junkies and addled unsavouries that used to spill out onto the street through its battered doors.

But that was then. Now it's a gastropub.