Kids Beer | Mike Grist

I’ve always said more things should have beer in them. Beer is after all one of the 5 food groups, along with rye, barley, gin, and malt liquor. Sometimes sure the product people get it right, with Beer Candy, Vegetable Beer, and Beer flavored Kit Kats, but I often wish they’d just try a bit harder, go the whole hog, really commit, and inject beer into more of the things that we love. When will we have beer medicine? When will we have beer tobacco? When will we have beer books that are written in beer?

Here from the sunny depths of the Izu peninsula comes one of life’s little beer success stories- Kids Beer!

Actually it doesn’t say anywhere on this beer bottle that it is beer. Cowards! What it actually says is- ‘Kids Drink’, which is about as precise as calling your feet ‘somebody’s appendages’ or an elephant a ‘grey thing’. Well, it’s true, so don’t bark up the wrong tree.

I’ve been wanting to drink me some kid’s beer for years, ever since I first heard about it on the award-winning blog of well-known numismatist Michael Beddall. He had to go up to fukushima to get his little taste of sweetness, since neither of us seem to have ever seen this concoction in Tokyo. I found it on a recent holiday to Izu.

Here is a picture of the beer, poured and gone psychedelic in an attempt to appeal to kids, who I’m told like bright colored things and shiny toys, a little like magpies.

Doesn’t it look like a delicious piece of candy? Yum yum! Let’s drink it!

And how does it taste? Well, it had some fruitiness, plus a sourish bit of yeasty flavor, but not really like beer, but not a bad approximation for kids. It foams up very nicely.

Hurray for beer!

TOKYO

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Comments 13

pireze

July 22, 2009 at 3:02 pm

What level of alcohol content does Kids Beer have?

leongsoon

July 22, 2009 at 4:28 pm

Yes indeed? Is there enough alcohol in there to get them drunk? 😀

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MJG

July 22, 2009 at 4:52 pm

Ah, good point you two both, and something I should have mentioned above. It’s not beer at all, but a substitute- hence no actual ‘beer’ on the packaging anywhere. It’s a beer substitute, with some vague beer flavoring, to simulate drinking real beer.

locohama

July 22, 2009 at 7:47 pm

well,when I have kids one day I’ll be sure to put this on their menu. when I was a kid i hated beer and I’m convinced that was because I wasn’t weened properly. thinks of all the years i missed thinking that beer was this awful crap that only adults with diminished taste buds can appreciate (-: