East. Far East.

Well, I've been a little preoccupied with the day-to-day routine of my job, though that has a lot less to do with the demands of the position and a little more with the snow that keeps getting dumped on Newark. For real - it's snowing again tonight.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've started into a new job and moved into a new apartment, and the one thing that saddens me the most is that I don't have a local bar near my place. Actually, the thing that saddens me the most is that the heat in my apartment is controlled by the elderly owner of the building, and I think she's trying to get us all to grow tropical fruits in our bedrooms. It's 77 degrees in my apartment right now. So beer helps with that.

Like drinking banana-flavored pancake syrup.

Today, I'm drinking the Ginga Kogen "Silver Bottle" Weizen. I'm a little concerned that the bottle isn't silver - it's dark blue. But the label is silver, and I suppose that's what they mean. There are antelope on this label, and I was heretofore unaware that there were antelope in Japan. This beer is very pale, with an aroma of sour hoppiness that I wasn't a huge fan of at first. The head disappeared quickly, and what's left has a sort of unctuous quality on the tongue. Initial flavors of citrus melted into a very sweet core of banana esters, with a hoppy bite that clears the palate at the end. It sits rather heavily in the stomach as well: something about being so thick and yet so stingy with the carbonation, I think. Ultimately, the sweet banana flavor and syrupy texture will take a lot of getting used to, and I just don't think I'm willing to make that effort. Delightfully, the Ginga Kogen website also doubles as a tourism shill for the region.

Hello? Hello taste? Where are you?

Bonus Beer: Yebisu Premium. This was a very thin lager with very little in the way of hops, depth, or backbone. Instead, what I got was honey and sweetness. Yebisu is marketed as an "all-malt beer," and while that's just fine, there was none of the caramel sweetness that I have come to associate with malt. Instead, it was a very one-dimensional sweetness that I didn't quite care for. Yes, I tend to be a dark-beer snob, but I have absolutely enjoyed a good many lagers. This just wasn't one of them.