Parcly Taxel: I might have gotten Fukuoka and Hakata (博多) mixed up when describing my voyage to various places in the former city. Let me check…
 
Spindle: You haven’t been wrong in that aspect. Hakata is only a ward of Fukuoka, albeit the most important one, containing the airport, municipal and prefectural offices and I-don’t-know-what-else. “Hakata ramen” refers to a time when it was a separate city from Fukuoka.
 
Parcly: Right then. Like any other country, mergers have happened between Japanese localities that were once a “long” way apart, as transportation becomes cheaper or faster and suburbs grow into each other. Even the outer boundary of the 23 special wards of Tokyo looks arbitrary when superimposed over a satellite map.
 
Spindle: We had booked a brewery tour for this day at 3pm. Before that, Parcly continued to use up her bag of cereal at breakfast – the small bowl meant she stretched her purchase. Her genie tail was under a perfect laminar flow, with no turbulence or choppy patches, the result of tucking her bottle under the blanket. She kept nudging it and folding it into various knots for some time, amazed at its sheer smoothness.
 
Moondancer: Japan prides itself on its food. Some ponies make trips just to eat food that can be found nowhere else, whether because of unique (perhaps secret!) ingredients or a preparation method passed down through the generations. The items found in supermarkets exemplify the other extreme: standard meals loved by those that don’t have time to pay attention to detail. Instant noodles, which I often eat, are one such food, but there is one panacea that tops them all on these islands, beer.
 
Parcly and her windigo assistant had a few hours to spend before beginning their brewery tour, so they went shopping at Loft, a lifestyle-focused department store. Many items there exist solely for convenience purposes, such as a fabric bag that can be folded onto a shopping basket and a mini conveyor belt, while some items are seasonal. Afterwards, the alicorn had a beef sub for lunch with a black sesame seed bun and potato wedges instead of cookies.
 
Parcly: Fukuoka has its own subway system, but the journey from where I was to the brewery was very short, making a taxi ride cheaper. I wasted more time walking around Don Quijote (ドン・キホーテ; Don Don Donki), known for its floor-to-ceiling shelves and tightly packed items, then flagged the taxi. Reaching the Asahi Hakata brewery fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, I was grouped together with some other visitors who had booked the same time slot.
 
Applejack: The process of brewing beer (not the cider my farm produces by hoof) involves pure water, barley, hops and possibly other ingredients such as starch. The relevant ingredients save for hops are mixed in a copper-lined vat first and filtered, producing wort. Hops and then yeast are introduced; the yeast feeds on sugars in wort, yielding ethanol. This “green beer” then goes to mature for a few weeks into the final product.
 
Spindle: Our tour began with a video presentation and an exhibition of other products manufactured by Asahi. Panels on the sides described the brewing process, opposite windows peering into titanic machines below speeding cans and packs and bottles around with crushing efficiency – one part was under maintenance when we came to see it, exposing the intricate systems in full glory. The brewing vats were a static jungle of steel, devoid of ponies like the packaging rooms were.
 
Parcly: At the end we entered a tasting room. I hesistantly got a glass of beer for myself, put it against my mouth and took a sip…
 
“The aftertaste hurts.” I couldn’t stand the intense bitterness. I pushed myself for about three more sips, then swapped my beer for coffee, though the paired sakana (肴) I still ate.
 
Spindle: Because we took a taxi to the brewery, which lies in a quiet part of Hakata, we took the train from the nearest station of Takeshita (竹下) back into Hakata Main, which was the first time we rode a train in this trip.
 
Parcly: Once there, I sobered up (feeling drunk despite not showing any physical signs of it, as well as high from the coffee) in the adjacent Yodobashi-Camera, before eating oyako don (親子丼) for dinner atop JR Hakata City (most major train stations have correspondingly large shopping centres built around them). Even though Canal City was ten minutes away, I took a taxi anyway back to the hotel, an early return to prepare for checking out and the short hop to Osaka.