Sapporo Beer Garden

This guide to Sapporo Beer Garden traces the red-brick building back to 1876, when a German-trained brewer named Seibei Nakagawa was ordered by the new Kaitakushi commission to make Hokkaido self-sufficient in beer. It follows the building's own separate life as an 1890 beet-sugar factory before Sapporo Beer converted it into a brewhouse, and the forty-eight-and-a-half-meter chimney that has watched over both eras. The same American adviser William Clark who told Hokkaido settlers to be ambitious arrived in this frontier the very year Nakagawa's first vats came alive.