Wait.. what is wrong with Japanese rice lagers?
At any Japanese convenience store, supermarket, or summer festival, you will find something called an American dog (アメリカンドッグ). At first glance, it looks like a short corn dog, and with a name like American dog, you expect it to be a corn dog.
But then you taste it, and it's sweet. Really sweet. You take a closer look, and you notice that it's made with donut batter, and there's no corn meal in it at all. This looks like a corn dog, but it is definitely not. I can't put ketchup or mustard on this. Who would put ketchup or mustard on a donut?
You wonder, is this what they think corn dogs really are? Or maybe it's just want they want corn dogs to be? Then you ask a Japanese person why they're so sweet, and don't have any cornmeal, and they tell you, "No Japanese people would eat them if they weren't sweet and had cornmeal."
And now we come to the American homebrewer's Japanese rice lager. Maybe it's made with two-row, a few boxes of minute rice, and handfuls of Sorachi Ace late in the boil, at flameout, maybe even dry-hopped. If you gave that beer to a Japanese beer drinker, are they going to think it's like a Japanese beer?
Japanese macro lagers (specifically Asahi Super Dry, Kirin Lager, and Sapporo Black Label) are adjunct lagers made with barley malt (traditionally at least 2/3 of the grist), rice,
corn, and an unspecified starch. They are
very dry, highly carbonated, hopped with bittering additions under 20 IBU, and don't have any flavor, aroma, or dry hops. They don't contain Sorachi Ace, except for maybe a trace in a Sapporo beer. You certainly won't find it in Kirin or Asahi beers.
People are going to call things what they want -- Lutra Helles, Japanese rice lager, whatever. I'm going to relax and have an Yebisu.
(...queue the theme song from "Man of La Mancha"...).
