Beer Inn Mugishutei

Beer Inn Mugishutei is the oldest craft beer bar still trading in Japan, and one of the most consequential. It opened in 1980, decades before "craft beer" meant anything in this country, and it opened because an American named Phred Kaufman decided Sapporo needed somewhere to drink beer from more than one brewery.

Kaufman's route here was circuitous. He first landed in Japan in the early 1970s, worked in a Tokyo cardboard factory, hitchhiked north to escape the humidity, went home to finish college, and returned for good in the late 1970s. Mugishutei followed, and with it a decades-long project of importing beer nobody else in Japan was importing. In 1992 he founded Ezo Beer, the import arm that brought Rogue Ales from Oregon into the Japanese market and had Rogue brew the bar's house label — Ezo Beer — specifically for Mugishutei.

The bar itself is a basement room off Minami 9-jo Nishi 5, in the Yoshiya Building south of Susukino. Around 300 bottles and cans from more than fifty countries fill the walls and fridges, alongside six rotating draught lines and a serious tequila and mezcal shelf. The decor is a forty-year accretion of brewery signs, glassware and ephemera, with 1980s MTV usually running on the screen. Regulars order the chips and salsa; the Hascup Ale, made with Hokkaido haskap berries, is the one to try if it is on.

Be aware of the cover charge — commonly reported at around ¥900 for locals, and often waived or reduced for overseas visitors. It buys you access to a collection that took four decades to assemble, and usually a conversation with the man who assembled it.

Opening Hours
Daily: 7pm–3am
No fixed closing day