Last night after work we finally got our mittens on a couple of glasses of half frozen beer. The experience was pretty interesting.
First of all, drinking it was hard. They pile on the frozen beer on top, and it is pretty hard to avoid that with your nose while drinking deeply. Inevitably, you end up with a little dab of frozen froth on the tip of your nose, which is fine for romantic comedies but doesn’t really go with the atmosphere of a blue-collar izakaya. I think the best approach is to kind of attack from the top and suck up all white foam off the top. It keeps your nose clean, but I don’t think sucking off the white head of the frozen beer looks all that cool either.
Once you get past that obstacle, the beer was quite good. The frozen foam stayed on top and the beer did remain very, very cold. The foam itself didn’t really taste that great, though. Maybe they make it from flat beer? It had a strange taste. Overall, the beer was good, but it did feel a little strange and the cold temperature wasn’t enough to offset the weird taste of the foam.
So I don’t think we’ll be investing in a machine to do it at home.
Still, that is the fun kind of experience that I came to Japan to get. Hopefully I’ll have more chances in the near future to try another strange experience…
