Machiya Beer

No Longer In Business

Visited with KansaiBeerLvrs on a pub crawl around Kyoto. Pretty much all Japanese language here, some English spoken in the museum shop. Small Japanese restaurant with two of their beers on draft. Ji-biru set wasn’t a bad deal with two good sized glasses of their drafts and three small plates of food. Old lady working was a bit snappy with Phil at first but warmed up towards the end. Sake museum is connected to the restaurant, hit up the restaurant first and then you can sneak into the museum without paying the fee. Bottles and stuff available to go in the museum shop. Okay stop if you happen to be around this part of Kyoto.

This is actually two places, one building is their showroom and in the back a sake museum (300 yen entrance) plus a small garden with a spring where you can try the water that was used to make sake. A very cool old building with a selection of their 3 beers (Alt, Kolsch & Dark) in bottles and 2 on tap (Alt & Kolsch). In the back/in a small building behind a parking lot nextdoor is a small bar/restaurant. Both are in these old sake warehouse brewery buildings. I think this is the home of the original brewery but now the head office has moved to Fushimi-ku, I went here with my wife and the food was nice with quite large portions. Lunch time is from 11am to 3pm (last order around 230) when you can pay just 1000 yen for a lunch set. Based on the portion sizes I think it’s a pretty good value. I had the tempura set & my wife a fish sashimi donburi set. They only have the Alt & Kolsch on tap for 650 yen which isn’t that great a value. It is cheaper to buy their bottles to go (525 yen). A few cool things are you can buy their glassware as well as a big 1L bottle (though it’s 2100 yen!) which has resealable flip-top, There was no lady on hand when I was there so I had no issue with the service which was friendly and mostly let me do my own thing. A good place if you plan on visiting Kyoto’s Imperial Palace, just head over there for lunch afterwards.

Went back again, and it was a bit better. They have good sake here, for sure. The beer is decidedly mediocre and over-priced. My first visit, I had to agree with TimE about the woman running the bar, but the next time I found her batty but fun. Problem is she only speaks Kyoto dialect. No standard Japanese, let alone English. She only warmed to me after I spoke back in dialect. Worth a stop, to see the lovely buildings and taste the sake--cheap tasting sets include their daiginjo. Try the namezake.

One of the crappest places I have been. An old bitter lady serving crappy beer (As my friend said "I don’t think they could even serve this in Gautanamo"). On top of that I had to ask her to take back the beer because it was litterally half head. In addition to this, when I came in I asked "do you serve beer here?" she replied "yes". Me "Ok, then can I get a sampler". five minutes later, we had a sampler of sake. WTF??? About five minutes after we got our beer, we were told to beat it because a tour group was coming in. Obviously Martin had a different experience, but I can’t recommend this place at all.

Check out my article for comments and pics for this brewpub: http://www.ratebeer.com/Beer-News/Article-691.htm