My madeleine

I am really more of a wine drinker than a beer drinker. I follow all those studies that keep popping up in the news -- wine has antioxidants, wine is good for your heart, wine lessens your risk of strokes. Beer, on the other hand, has been associated with gout in populations of men who drink it heavily. Although now I think I'm going to focus more on the B vitamins in hops, because beer is back in my radar again.

For reasons that could be a whole different blog post, I ordered Kirin with my sushi at lunch the other day. I drank it out of the bottle, not the glass, and when I took that first swig it was an amazing experience. All of a sudden, all those many beer drinking experiences of my distant youth hit me with full force. It was high school beer parties on warm summer nights, it was fancy Japanese dinners at long tables on tatami floors*, it was funky little restaurants in Japantown after a long evening of martial arts practice, it was every night I've ever spent when drinking beer for its own sake seemed a worthwhile pursuit. It was youth in a glass and it tasted good.

Amazingly, the whole bottle tasted good, not just that first drink. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Should you like more information on the mythic beast this beer is named after, here is a picture of a kirin, and here is Wikipedia's edifying entry on the subject.

* You may think of sake as the Japanese alcoholic beverage of choice, but I can tell you from experience that they drink a lot of beer. Also whiskey.