THIS PLACE IS NOW UNFORTUNATELY CLOSED
Today, another place that we managed to visit on this year’s Sendai trip. It has been open less than a year and is an interesting addition to the city’s beer scene, being I think the first brewery taproom in town. Tazawako is from Akita, so not even that close, but I guess Tohoku sticks together and promotes each other’s stuff. Would love to get up to Akita some time and check out a few of the breweries up there, but I suspect that would be a little out of the range for this blog. I feel that anything much over an hour and a half on a shinkansen is probably stretching the remit of Tokyo Beer Drinker a bit far. Anyway, here’s what you need to know.
– Brewery taproom for Tazawako Beer who make mainly German style beers (much like many other Japanese breweries!), some of which are really nice. Second floor narrow room with the bar down one side and tables for around 20 and a counter for five. Serves some interesting food with a Tohoku influence. One of the big attractions for us was that they have iburigakko which we like a lot. Also there was a pizza with miso, negi and nori which was pretty unusual and pretty delicious.
– Eight taps of beer, six of which are regulars and two guests. On the day of our visit one of the guests was actually one of their beers. The regulars were Alt, Kolsch, Pils, Dark Lager, Buna No Mori and Sakura Komachi. I believe that at least some of these regulars also rotate with the seasons. Beers are served in three sizes, regular (300ml, ¥480), large (510ml, ¥780) and Tazawako glass (1000ml, ¥1500). Beer flight of 280ml of any three of your choice (including guests) for ¥990. Tax is added afterwards, but these are still pretty good prices!
– Unfortunately has the double bummer whammy of a cover charge (¥300) and smoking being permitted, both of which are a shame, but at least the cover charge is compensated somewhat by the prices being pretty cheap.
So, this is something a little different in Sendai which seems to have more than its fair share of pub chains. I always like to visit breweries’ taprooms and the beer flight option means that you can easily plough through most of the taps quite cheaply. When you compare the sizes and prices of the regular glass and the flight, the flight looks like an even better deal. I can imagine this will be somewhere that we’ll pop back into next year as the food was exactly what we were looking for (even after we had already eaten), and some of the beers were really nice. Cheers!
Japanese breweries recently seen on tap:
Tazawako
Opening Hours:
Monday-Saturday, holidays and the day before a holiday, 17:00-23:00
Closed Sunday
Location/Map:
一番町 3-6-12 2F, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi-ken
Telephone:
022-796-2988
Links:
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