Sapporo Beer Museum
Red brick former sugar factory turned malt house, tracing Japan's first home grown lager back to eighteen seventy-six.
This guide to the Sapporo Beer Museum follows Seibei Nakagawa, who left Niigata at seventeen and trained for twenty-six months at a brewery outside Berlin before returning in eighteen seventy-five as one of the only people in Japan who knew how to brew German-style lager. It traces the Kaitakushi's decision to send him north instead of Tokyo, betting that Hokkaido's snow and ice were exactly what cold fermentation needed, and the modest wooden brewery that opened here that September. Look up at the old iron kettle inside, once used to cook barley in the red brick hall that started life as a sugar factory.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.