Rice Lagers Offer Approachability Through a Fresh Lens

Early last year, Yuki and Yumi Shiono, a married Japanese couple in Brooklyn, entertained a grain of thought. The hospitality veterans knew that New York City’s Japanese restaurants mainly served staple Asian lagers such as Sapporo and Tsingtao. Surely there must be menu space for locally made Japanese craft beer.

Yuki, who worked at Brooklyn’s Interboro brewery, and Yumi, a bartender at Rockaway Brewing in Queens, played that hunch by founding NYC’s first Japanese brewery, Saltfields. Because so many Japanese restaurants assumed “American craft beer was only IPAs,” the couple decided to make beers featuring a more familiar ingredient. “Rice is the heart of Japanese food culture,” Yuki says. They got started by partnering with Brooklyn’s Wild East Brewing to produce a lager containing Calrose rice—a medium-grain variety often used for sushi—and white koji, the fungus facilitating sake production. “I wanted to express my identity through beer,” Yuki says.

In April 2025, Saltfields released cans and kegs of crisp, delicately acidic Nodogoshi rice lager, landing placements at ramen shops, izakayas, and Japanese fine dining restaurants. “They’re excited to sell Asian beer made by Asian people in New York City,” Yuki says. Beer and wine bars are also big accounts, appealing to drinkers fatigued by double IPAs. “Rice lager is so easy to drink,” Yuki says.  

Expanding beer’s audience is top of mind for a struggling brewing industry seeking to staunch declining sales, stoke new interest, and shore up aging ranks. That 2010s playbook of gimmicky ingredients and IPA everything is played out, and Frankensteining together trends—a hazy fruited sour ale, anyone?—isn’t the right answer. Beer’s well of innovation is endless, yet there’s no need to dig deeper. “We don’t need more beer styles,” says Neil Witte, a master cicerone.

Food-friendly rice lagers also align with Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian cuisine, bringing craft beer to new dinner tables.

Here’s the rice move. To attract multicultural customer bases and uncover new sales channels, breweries are leaning into not-too-strong lagers made with rice varieties, such as jasmine and basmati, that deliver broadly appealing refreshment. Food-friendly rice lagers also align with Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian cuisine, bringing craft beer to new dinner tables. Sipped between slurps of ramen or crushed with Indian curries, rice lagers are accessible and easily understood, requiring no lengthy bartender explanation before ordering a round. “There’s a familiarity with rice in beer,” says Van Sharma, a co-founder of Rupee Beer, whose Basmati Rice Lager is sold in Indian restaurants in 23 states and counting.

You’ve probably crushed beers brewed with rice. The grain lightens a beer’s body and lends crispness to America’s most iconic lagers, notably Budweiser and Bud Light, which contain Arkansas-grown rice. During a recent reporting trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, I saw dive-bar neon signage glowingly touting the state’s agrarian contribution. It’s been years since I’ve had a Bud, but a couple of cold bottles ably quenched my thirst.

Given its role in mass-market beer, rice has been an easy, if off-the-mark, target for scorn. In 2012, the Brewers Association trade group decreed that breweries using adjuncts like rice and corn weren’t making traditional beer, making them ineligible to be craft breweries. Pure poppycock. When German brewers immigrated to the United States in the 19th century, they found America’s indigenous six-row barley too harsh. Corn added calming sweetness that created America’s quintessential lager. The Brewers Association revised its guidelines several years later to permit craft breweries to use corn and rice.

Japan is not a great barley-growing region, but the country produces plenty of rice that formed the recipes for its famous lagers, in particular Asahi Super Dry. It originated in the mid-1980s when struggling Asahi sought to flip flagging fortunes by developing a richly flavored and refreshing lager that was lower in calories and carbohydrates than competitors’ beer. Super Dry debuted in 1987 as a sensation sparking the so-called Dry Wars with Kirin Dry, Sapporo Dry, and Suntory Dry vying for sales supremacy. Asahi Super Dry won and today remains the country’s best-selling beer, owing to its karakuchi taste. Loosely translated, that means the lager is crisp and quenching with a quick, clean finish.

Super Dry is a touchstone for pFriem Family Brewers’ rice-driven Japanese Lager, which uses “adjuncts to create flavor and dimension,” says Josh Pfriem, brewmaster and co-founder of the Hood River, Oregon, brewery. About 20 percent of Japanese Lager’s grain bill is rice that contributes a subtle sweetness and aromas evocative of shiso plums, lavender, and green tea. The sensory profile makes “you think about Japan without adding anything weird or funny,” Pfriem says. The brewery introduced Japanese Lager in 2018, and sales have steadily grown, so much so that pFriem repackaged the lager last fall in sleek silver-and-black cans nodding to Super Dry’s iconic coloring scheme. The new identity helped grow the lager’s volume 35 percent. Japanese Lager is “on fire,” Pfriem says. “It’s our fastest-growing brand.”

Harland Brewing in San Diego released its floral Japanese Lager, packed with puffed jasmine and toasted rice, in 2020, finding that fans span a wide range, from someone first wading into craft beer to septuagenarians, says Anthony Levas, the president and co-founder. Recently, Levas’s 73-year-old neighbor hosted a party serving Harland’s Japanese Lager. “She was like, ‘This is the best beer I’ve had inso long,’” Levas says. 

Branding a beer as “Japanese” lets breweries tap the country’s reputation for quality and craftsmanship. The challenge is maintaining meticulous standards. In 2024, Harland’s brewing staff and leadership traveled to Japan on an inspirational trip and returned to San Diego energized by the Japanese concept of kaizen, or continual daily improvements. Brewers tweaked the Japanese Lager in the “tiniest ways to make it even cleaner, even crisper,” Levas says. “Now it’s doing better than ever.”

America’s current cultural crush on Japan also explains the appeal. Sushi is sold at every grocery store, Japanese listening bars spin vinyl, and Japanese bartenders run some of New York City’s most acclaimed cocktail bars, including Sip & Guzzle and Katana Kitten. Japan, too, is more accessible than ever for international travelers. “I have six friends in Japan right now,” says Zac Ross, founder and brewer at Marlowe Artisanal Ales in Mamaroneck, New York.

Last year, Ross traveled to Japan twice and drank Asahi nightly; back in New York, he sought restaurants and bars that reminded him of Japan. “And then I was like, ‘We have a brewery. Why don’t we make something like Asahi?’” Ross says. He made Marlowe’s homage, Sugoi, with rice inoculated by koji, an ingredient the brewpub uses to marinate shrimp and age beef. From kitchen to brew kettle ,“we try to unify everything we do,” Ross says.

Last summer’s Sugoi (Japanese for “awesome”) release was a success, and Ross re-released it this May in advance of what he calls “Sugoi summer.” Marlowe converted its patio into an homage to Tokyo’s lively Omoide Yokocho bar district, stringing up paper lanterns and serving Sugoi in special 500 milliliter bottles with custom six-ounce glasses. Everyone splits the bottle, as per tradition. Says Ross, “We’re curating a Japanese experience in Mamaroneck.”

Cuisines often dictate a restaurant’s drinks list. Wine is expected at French and Italian restaurants, but cold beer is commonplace at South Asian restaurants delivering bold, intense flavors cut by snappy rice lagers. “They scrape your palate clean, says Kevin Kowalski, head brewer at CLAG Brewing in Sandusky, Ohio. The Asian brewpub’s menu runs from spicy tuna rolls to steaming beef pho that customers order with 22-ounce glasses of Magic Sauce, the rice lager named after CLAG’s pungent Vietnamese-inspired house sauce. For customers, ordering rice lagers with grilled pork chops on broken rice is “par for the course,” Kowalski says. “You’ve got to have a rice lager.”

Chintan Pandya is chef-partner of Unapologetic Foods, a Michelin-starred restaurant group focusing on India’s expansive culinary heritages with amplified spice, unstinting heat, and unexpected offal. “We sell a lot of beer,” Pandya says. The restaurant group originally sourced beer from local breweries before partnering with Brooklyn’s Transmitter Brewing on a custom basmati rice lager. Several years ago, Unapologetic Foods introduced the smooth UN1 Basmati Rice Lager, and “it became an overnight success,” Pandya says. “People were so blown away by the taste and the concept.” 

Rupee Beer’s Sharma comes from a family of Indian restaurateurs. His parents, Raj and Bina, immigrated to Maine and opened Bangor, Brunswick, and Portland restaurants serving curries with imported Indian beer. “We grew up selling their beers before we were old enough to drink,” Sharma says. “There are pictures of us from when we were 5 or 6 years old standing behind the bar holding a Kingfisher bottle.”

As the Covid pandemic deepened in 2020, imported Indian beer’s supply chain snapped, leading Sharma and his brother, Sumit, to found Rupee Beer to fill the gap with their Basmati Rice Lager. “We were simply trying to solve a problem,” Sharma says. Another problem to correct: the clash between spicy food and excess carbonation, which can exacerbate the burning sensation and cause bloating—ill effects that Sharma has experienced. To minimize that, Rupee packages Basmati Rice Lager with lower carbonation, marketing the beer as “specially crafted for Indian, spicy, and world cuisine.” This wide culinary berth has helped Rupee land placements in traditional curry houses, plus Thai, Middle Eastern, and other international restaurants. Rice and lagers are universal, no matter the cuisine, providing the rare runway to create a national brand. “The goal is to have distribution in all 50 states,” Sharma says.

Instead of aiming nationally, Arbeiter Brewing is making a mark in Minneapolis with Tokki, its Korean-style rice lager created by Korean American owner Juno Choi. “Having traveled to Korea and sampled beers, this is an interpretation of what I wanted to see in that style,” Choi says. Tokki contains a high percentage of rice (around 27 percent) that delivers a nearly translucent hue, bone-dryness, and perceived sweetness. “It elevates what a Korean-style lager can be,” Choi says. Tokki’s facility with food is driving placements at restaurants, including Hmong standout Vinai and Korean-fusion Minari—its top two accounts. “In Korean culture, we know that drinking beer really goes well with food,” Choi says.

Japanese lagers once arrived in America from afar, crossing vast aquatic expanses to arrive at local sushi restaurants. Now Japanese breweries are buying American craft breweries to produce one time imports on domestic soil. Kirin subsidiary Lion Little World Beverages purchased New Belgium in 2019, adding Bell’s two years later. In 2022, Sapporo Breweries bought Stone Brewing (recently sold to Firestone Walker and Duvel USA) to produce Sapporo Lager in Richmond, Virginia. And Asahi acquired Octopi Brewing in Waunakee, Wisconsin, in 2024 to make stateside Super Dry, no rice required.

“Asahi Super Dry produced in markets outside of Japan does not contain rice and hasn’t done so for some time,” an Asahi spokesperson emailed. Rice is also omitted from all-malt Sapporo, plus Kirin Ichiban and Kirin Light. “The perception that Japanese lager equals rice lager is not entirely accurate,” Jimmy Nakajima, the Kirin strategy director, wrote in an email. Japanese beer culture dates to the late 19th century, during the Meiji era, when German-influenced pilsner-style lagers were introduced. They were traditionally brewed as all-malt beers, “and that same approach was adopted in Japan,” Nakajima writes. “There is a theory that rice began to be used during and after World War II, when securing raw materials became difficult.”(Kirin uses rice in several Japanese beer brands; malt-only Kirin Ichiban is standardized globally.)

Moreover, making rice lagers can be mighty challenging. Rice must be cooked to convert its starches into fermentable sugars (brewers can use pre-cooked and flattened flaked rice). The grain can contribute an unwanted sulfury note, make a beer too thin or watery, or add an unpleasant gummy texture. Lucky Envelope Brewing, in Seattle, highlights Chinese traditions and Asian culinary ingredients, including lychees and shishito peppers, but “rice was an ingredient that terrified me to use as a brewer,” says Barry Chan, the head brewer and co-founder.

In time, Chan learned how to coax out rice’s beneficial qualities—dryness, crispness—while minimizing drawbacks as he incorporated the grain into IPAs and lagers. Last spring, Lucky Envelope released Karakuchi as a new core beer. “We call it a Japanese-style lager because it’s made with rice and corn,” Chan says. “The combination of the two ingredients is more commonly used in mass-produced Japanese beers.”

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, many gluten-free beers, like Redbridge from Anheuser-Busch InBev, contained sorghum. It could contribute a cloying sweetness, nuttiness, or unwanted sourness. “Personally, we don’t like sorghum,” says Stellar Cassidy, co-founder and chief operating officer of Otherwise Brewing, a gluten-free San Francisco brewery. Otherwise opened in early 2021 and produces stouts, sour ales, and IPAs with rice, including best-selling Cali Crisp rice lager. “Rice lager has intrigue,” Cassidy says. “It provides elegant sophistication that excites people more than something that just says ‘lager.’”

That extends to presentation. Czech-style lager pours showcasing great foamy poofs that tweak texture and flavor are widespread. Japan, too, has its own lager-pouring technique. In the 1990s, Asahi pioneered a beer-service style called the “sharp pour,” in which beer is poured without foam and then topped with overflowing foam. Excess is scraped off and the glass is dunked in ice water, providing pomp with purpose. A sharp pour delivers textural “contrast between this sweet, wet, drinkable foam that’s super-creamy and the crisp carbonated beer with bitterness in there underneath,” says Witte, the master cicerone. “You can hardly tell where the foam stops and the beer starts.”

Sharp pours of lagers are now popular at brewery taprooms nationwide, from Holy Mountain in Seattle to Argenta Brewing in Portland, Maine, and Atrium Brewing in Louisville, Kentucky. Witte also runs his Ritual Pour pop-up at breweries including Blue Jay, a St. Louis lager specialist, where he serves one beers even ways, including the sharp pour. “I get people who are skeptical, but almost everybody walks away, feeling like, ‘OK, this is really cool,’” Witte says.

Evocative storytelling and branding are essential to selling beer. A recent wave of Mexican-style lagers peddled sunny, lime-squeezed escapism for Taco Tuesdays and beach vacations, real or imagined. Japanese-style rice lagers conjure connotations of elevated craftsmanship from afar yet close at hand. It’s the same old sold as something new. “There’s a good chance that if you put a Japanese rice lager up against somebody’s Mexican lager and an American light lager in a blind panel, you might not tell the difference,” Witte says.

What matters is that the beer meets today’s desire for moderate alcohol and massive refreshment, qualities that transcend borders and cultures. Rice has historically played a crucial role in creating many of America’s favorite beers. Now the next generation of beer drinkers, who look different than the last, are finding favorite rice lagers to call their own. Hey bud, can you toss me a can of that Tokki? All out? That basmati rice lager works, too. Says Sharma, “We’re going through a phase where rice beer is having a glow-up.”