After our early morning and a much needed nap, we head back out to the underground. After chasing across town and going to the various underground stations we finally find the one we need and spend the next 40 mins on a train to the outskits of Tokyo to meet with a bus that will take us to the Asaki Brewery. While we wait for the bus we meet 2 young Swedes who are holidaying in Japan for a couple of weeks who are also doing the tour and so we sit with them. It soon becomes apparent that some how we have missed the bus or it hasn't tunred up which is very 'un-Japanese' and so one of the Swedes luckily has the brewerys number and phones them to find out another bus is coming. Then he happens to look across the way and it is actually on the other side of the line and so all 4 of us have to run like idots to catch it, up the stairs and down again.
Finally at the brewery it is very Japanese, very modern and clean building with a pretty garden with a pond. Inside we have missed the start of our English tour and so after much apologising a lovely young lady gives the 4 of us a seperate tour. We get to see the hops and barley that is used, also the fermintation tanks and then we catch up with the others in our English tour which are oddly Cambodians and Japenese, no English in sight. We then get to see the bottling and canning, which is amazing so efficent. we can see only 4 people and lots of machines. It is also sooooo quick there is a little game machine with a start button and a stop button, this starts and stops a timer, Colin starts it and stops it after 1 second and it shows how many bottle and cans have been filled in this time, I can't remember the bottles, but it was 5 cans in this time amazingly quick.
We then got to try the beers, one 'dry' and then a dark, not enough time though before we are asked to leave as it is the end of the tour and we didn't get our third beer in, which was all included in this FREE tour brillant.
We then got to buy some souvenirs and take some pics before we left, although Col and the Swede did take some pics in the no pics section and so we now have some fab pics of our tour in the brewery itself.
Brillant to see, loved it, especially for free, well worth the effort getting there.
