Sapporo

AFFORDABILITY: The Sapporo is not the cheapest tall can out there, but it is the niftiest shaped one. I will glady pay a little extra for some tight ergonomically correct feng shui boost to my life. My life needs all the boost it can get. And as I wrap my brain around a different drinking mentality, dropping $3 for one tasty silver tall can of Jap brew is a nice punctuation to the day. I don’t need to sink back into that “Well, I could get a 6-pack of Old Milwaukee for that price, and thus get drunker” train of thought. Really, I wish I could shake trains of thought like that, which seem to have most of the mainlines through my mindframe. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Being it is a child's name for Bob Sapp, I figured the Sapporo would be more beast-like. It was not. I know Jap beers have a strong reputation for being a double dropkick to sobriety, but I also know fringe-minded white American males tend to overemphasize how awesome Japanese things can be, to seem off-beat and quirky, but within the relative foreign safety zone of Japan, without a shred of threat to America whatsoever. Only time nuclear bombs got dropped was the U.S. on Japan, and sure they electronically bedazzle our asses on the regular, they don't come across as any real threat, so to sport yellow fever and accept wacky Japanese things as your hipster contrarian identity (or a facet of it, because you have to admit, hipsterism is so deeply pervasive now, that most hipster types have multiple elements to their purposely quirky personality) is not that dangerous a thing. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Sapporo 22 ounce can is the most ergonomically correct and space age gangsta beer packaging device ever devised. The brushed silver look with gold and black symbols and info very subtlely added add to the stylishness. Seriously, if I hadn’t seen a whole row of these on a store shelf to show and prove to my brain that they were mass produced, I would think this was some sort of trophy given only to people who have gone above and beyond the standard accepted level of good-timed generosity as a token of our collective appreciation of the life they live. That type of person acts without attachment to the fruits of their actions, like a Vietnam Indian hobo used to tell me about in Monroe Park in Richmond, and I later learned that was Buddha talk or Hindu talk or both, but I still attach it in my mind to that one dude, because he was living it, not learning it. 17 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Sapporo is Japanese, I assume. Can says it is imported by Sapporo USA, based in New York City. In smaller print, can says “Brewed and canned by Sapporo Brewing Company, Guelph, Ontario, Canada”. On one hand, I really like how shit that gets popular in Japan basically makes a satellite office in either N.Y.C. or L.A. and calls itself Crazy Jap Words USA, with an LLC tacked on half the time. But on the other hand, this reads like some textbook multi-national corporation nonsense, and if paranoid post-midnight perusals of the internet have taught me anything, when led by Jeff Rense or William B. Cooper or Alex Jones or David Icke, this Sapporo shit is most likely some zionist alien illuminati propaganda extravaganza. And the can says “since 1876”, a perfect 100 years from America’s theatrical independence. I’m sure that means something too. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The Sapporo was quite enjoyable, but I had been thinking about hardcore Japanese wrestling with Matsuhiro Matsunaga throwing dudes into cactus plants the other day, so maybe I was just tinted by Japophilia. The Sapporo was pretty nice though, and it has the nicest can in the bizness, and I bet if there was a great Korean restaurant with homemade fermented kimchi like I dream about in a dilapidated strip mall, for lack of enough Korean beer choices, they'd offer the Sapporo, and the old lady who cooked the food would come out herself to tell you what it was, because there wasn't a menu so much as a list of suggestions that constantly changed, like all good hole-in-the-wall foreign people bonafide food places. All of this means tightness of memory. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 & 3/5 STARS!