Update June 2026: pFriem Family Brewers has now won two World Beer Cup medals for its Japanese lager. Learn more about the esteemed example of this style here.
A little while back I posted a story about a new Japanese lager from No-Li Brewhouse. It stirred up some questions and comments, which tells me people are curious about this style — and maybe a little confused. So let’s dig in. I’ll also tackle the name question: rice lager, Japanese lager, or some combination of the two? For most of this piece I’ll call it rice lager, and I’ll explain why the name gets complicated toward the end.
It Starts With Rice. Obviously.
To brew a rice lager, a brewer swaps some of the grain bill — the grist, in brewing terms — for rice. How much rice? That varies wildly. North Carolina’s Hi-Wire Brewing won a GABF gold medal with a Japanese Dry Rice Lager brewed with an eye-popping 49 percent rice. On the other end of the spectrum, Recluse Beer Works out of Washougal, Washington, used 12.5 percent rice in their Ugly Mug Rice Lager — which is probably closer to what most breweries are doing.
Recluse’s approach is worth noting. Alongside rice syrup solids at that 12.5 percent rate, they used a blend of two North American pilsner malts, some German dextrin malt, and acidulated malt, with three different hops providing low-level bitterness and just a whisper of aroma. Thoughtful, considered, intentional. Not an accident.
Here’s a fun fact for your next trivia night: in Japan, that Hi-Wire beer — at 49 percent rice — would technically qualify as a happoshu, a sparkling beverage made with less than two-thirds malt content. Japan taxes happoshu at a lower rate than beer, for reasons rooted in its own regulatory history. The U.S. makes no such distinction, so we’re free to call it whatever we want. (Lucky us.)
A Tricky Ingredient
Brewing with rice isn’t as simple as just throwing it in the kettle. The brewer has to convert the starches into fermentable sugar — same as with malted barley, but rice plays by different rules and presents different challenges. Some breweries use cooked rice — think Minute Rice, or something like it. Some use rice syrup solids. Others use raw rice and convert it in the brewhouse through a cereal-cooking process, as pFriem Family Brewers does. Flaked rice, rice malt — there are a lot of approaches, and I’m honestly okay with it being a little mysterious.
In technical terms, rice is an adjunct — an ingredient other than malted barley that contributes fermentable sugar. Corn works the same way. Adjunct is not a dirty word, despite what some beer purists might tell you. Don’t blame the rice. It’s a perfectly lovely ingredient when used properly.
Speaking of which — the largest brewery in the United States uses a significant portion of rice in one of its flagship beers. (Chill out, bud, you know the one.) Which is partly why a lot of craft breweries prefer the term “Japanese lager.” It puts some distance between their carefully crafted beer and that particular mass-produced product.
A Brief History
Japanese brewers got into the beer game in the 1800s, importing German equipment, German brewmasters, and German ingredients — which, from the other side of the planet, couldn’t have been cheap. Japan had rice in abundance. Barley, not so much. The rest, as they say, is history.
“In Japan, they have an abundance of rice and very, very high-quality rice, so they started integrating that into brewing, not to dumb down the brewing or to make it more watery, but to actually add another flavor, to create another dimension,” says Josh pFriem, one of the founders of pFriem Family Brewers — a brewery that has now won two World Beer Cup medals for its Japanese lager, which is not nothing. “And then this developed into something that was uniquely their own, what we now know as Japanese lager.”
One more name to know: dry lager. When you see that on a label, you’re almost certainly looking at some version of a rice lager. Asahi introduced its Super Dry in 1987 and claims it was the first beer designated as such. Several American mega-brewers followed suit not long after. But using rice to create a drier character in beer is a much older Japanese tradition than any of that.
What Does It Actually Taste Like?
“It’s very delicate in nature,” says pFriem. “It leans into more of a realm of sake, where you have like a very jasmine-type character, then the hops play in a beautiful way off of that malt and rice. This lends to a beer that’s more delicate than a pilsner, but much more interesting than an industrial lager.”
Gus Everson at Recluse Beer Works puts it a bit differently: “It should be light in flavor and aroma, fizzy, and refreshing. My mind always goes to something produced in an efficient, industrial fashion. The fun being the careful attention to detail to create a delicately simple beverage.”
Everson also raises an interesting point about rice versus corn as adjuncts. “It seems to me that rice can impart a slightly more elegant flavor and aroma to these light, refreshing beers and that could contribute to why it is more often singled out by name over its counterpart. Both rice and corn do help lighten up beers in their own beautiful way.”
So What Do We Call It?
Call it whatever you want. Seriously. Rice lager, Japanese lager — both are fine. Calling it a Japanese lager is not perpetuating a stereotype; it’s a respectful nod to a proud brewing tradition that goes back more than a century, to breweries like Asahi and Sapporo. It’s a term used in reverence, not appropriation. And if a brewery prefers rice lager? Also fine. The beer doesn’t care what you call it.
It just wants to be cold and enjoyed. Preferably by you.
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