Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum Travel Video Guide

Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum Travel Itinerary

• Maps and flag of Japan
• Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum travel photos
• Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum travel forum
• Flights to Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum
• Hotels in Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum
• Hostels in Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum
• Buy the guide book!

It was an American advisor to Hokkaido who noted the hops growing locally and realized that with its abundant winter ice Sapporo was the ideal location for a commercial brewery. When the first brewery opened in 1876, locals didn't touch beer, so for years Sapporo exported to the foreign community in Tokyo - today the Japanese knock back around seven million kilolitres a year.

The hugely popular Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum (daily 9am-5pm; free) stands just east of the city centre. Beer is still brewed in this grand red-brick building, which dates from 1891, but it's now the company's smallest brewery since much of the building has been turned over to a large, modern exhibition on the brewing process and the history of the company, not to mention several restaurants, pubs and souvenir shops. It's worth going on the free, one-hour tour, as you can pick up a recorded English-language commentary at the beginning, though this often gets drowned out by the guide's enthusiastic use of her mini-megaphone. The best tactic is to lag behind the tour group and catch up at the end, when free samples of the main product can be enjoyed. Look out for the ingenious combined model

and video display where a fairy emerges from a glass of beer.

The beer garden and museum are roughly a twenty-minute walk east of Sapporo Station. The easiest way to get here is to hop on the Factory bus, which departs every ten minutes or so from in front of the Seibu department store at West Three, North Four. The bus goes via the Sapporo Factory, the first of Sapporo's breweries in the city, converted in 1993 into a shopping and entertainment complex.

Your Tips For Sapporo Beer Garden and Museum

• Kyushu Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  Lying off the south end of Honshu, Japan's third largest island, KYUSHU , is surrounded by a spray of smaller islands which trail off in a long arc across the East China Sea. - Japan
  

• Western Honshu Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  Also known as Chugoku , meaning "middle country", Western Honshu used to be at the centre of the Japanese nation, lying between the country's earliest settlements in Kyushu and the imperial city of Kyoto. - Japan
  

• Central Honshu Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  Located roughly midway along the Japanese archipelago, the seven prefectures of CENTRAL HONSHU , known as Chubu , offer a wide choice of terrain and travel possibilities. - Japan
  

• Okinawa Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  The prefecture of Okinawa comprises more than one hundred islands, stretching over 700km of ocean from Kyushu southwest to Yonaguni-jima, almost within sight of Taiwan. - Japan
  

• Kansai Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  In a country so devoid of flat land, the great rice-growing plains of KANSAI , the district around Osaka and Kyoto, are imbued with an almost mystical significance. - Japan
  

• Around Tokyo Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  Tokyo is hemmed into its coastal location on the Kanto plain by a ring of mountains and volcanoes, featuring temples, parks and a couple of bustling towns and cities. - Japan
  

• Shikoku Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  It has beautiful scenery, a laid-back atmosphere, friendly people and several notable sights, yet SHIKOKU , Japan's fourth main island, is usually at the bottom of most visitors' itineraries - if it appears at all. - Japan
  

• Hokkaido Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  Many Japanese see HOKKAIDO as an idyllic, unspoiled frontier - the perfect place to escape from industrialized Japan and get back in touch with nature. - Japan
  

• Northern Honshu Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  When the famous poet Matsuo Basho set out on his travels along the "narrow road to the deep north" in 1689, he commented, somewhat despondently, "I might as well be going to the ends of the earth. - Japan
  

• Tokyo Japan Travel Videos
  Japan Travel Itinerary
  On the edge of the Orient, TOKYO - the last great conurbation before the yawning chasm of the Pacific Ocean - is one of the world's most perplexing cities. - Japan