2008年7月28日 星期一

Eel drink goes on sale for Japan's hot summer

Eel drink goes on sale for Japan's hot summer

A Japanese chef uses a fan to prepare grilled eels at an eel restaurant specializing in eels in this central Japanese city of Nagoya on Thursday July 24, 2008. The restaurant, which handles only home-grown eels, was crowded with customers who want to beat the summer heat with grilled eels on Thursday.
Kyodo News
A Japanese chef uses a fan to prepare grilled eels at an eel restaurant specializing in eels in this central Japanese city of Nagoya on Thursday July 24, 2008. The restaurant, which handles only home-grown eels, was crowded with customers who want to beat the summer heat with grilled eels on Thursday.

It's the hottest season of the year in Japan, and that means it's eel season. So, bottom's up!

A canned drink called "Unagi Nobori," or "Surging Eel," made by Japan Tobacco Inc., hit the nation's stores this month just ahead of Japan's annual eel-eating season, company spokesman Kazunori Hayashi said Monday.

"It's mainly for men who are exhausted by the summer's heat," Hayashi said of the beverage, believed to be the first mass-produced eel drink in Japan.

Many Japanese believe eating eel boosts stamina in hot weather.

The fizzy, yellow-colored drink contains extracts from the head and bones of eel and five vitamins - A, B1, B2, D and E - contained in the fish.

The Japanese particularly like to eat eel on traditional eel days, which fall on July 24 and Aug. 5 this year.

Demand for eel is so high that Japan has been hit by scores of eel fraud cases, including a recent high-profile incident in which a government ministry publicly scolded two companies for mislabeling eel imported from China as being domestically grown.

The eel involved in recent scandals was prepared in a popular "kaba-yaki" style, in which it is broiled and covered with a sweet sauce. The $1.30 drink costs about one-tenth as much as broiled eel, but has a similar flavor.

Eel extract is also used in cookies and pies made in Japan's biggest eel producing town, Hamamatsu.

You Can Have Your Rice and Drink It, Too


You Can Have Your Rice and Drink It, Too

Robert Caplin for The New York Times

The sake and the glasses are kept on ice at En Japanese Brasserie.

Published: July 27, 2008

bozo, dolt

THERE are certain things New York’s drinking sophisticates expect everyone — including tourists — to know. Can’t tell a malbec from a shiraz? You’re a bozo. Indifferent when facing a choice of Bud Light or Bass? What a dolt. Can’t distinguish Johnnie Walker from a single-malt scotch? Such a choob (that’s Scottish slang for a bozo or a dolt).

But if you can’t tell a junmai from a honjozo sake, who can blame you? There’s no culture of sake snobbery in New York, so you won’t be penalized for being an amateur. In fact, since it’s summer, and sake — the traditionally Japanese drink brewed by fermenting rice — is often chilled, you’ll be amply rewarded.

Punctuating a weekend in town with stops in sake bars has an added bonus: things will not become repetitive. It’s almost impossible to define the typical sake spot in town. Cozy or vast, cute or corporate, uptown or down, Japanese ex-pat crowd or American crowd. Take your pick, or take them all.

Sake veterans are likely to instruct you to make Sakagura your first stop so you can appreciate the breadth of the sake world. Two hundred varieties, along with tons of tapas-size plates for accompaniment (chilled duck wrapped around scallions, chicken meatball teriyaki and dozens more — see nytimes.com/dining for a full food review by Peter Meehan). Though its location on East 43rd Street is hardly a secret, the entrance is highly unusual, through a harshly lighted lobby and through some office building that makes you feel as if you’re going down to the laundry room.

There are several tasting flights available, and though the staff is well-trained to explain them, you could just read the descriptions on the menu. Current examples include the Kacho Gesseki Daiginjo, which “smells fragrant like a beautiful flower lily with a mature taste.” Or the Yume Wa Masayume Junmai Daiginjo, aged five years (unusual for sake), whose “flavor will make you feel your dreams come true.” Note: Don’t dream that the $40 price of the tasting flight will be accidentally left off the check; that one will not come true.

The owner of Sakagura also owns Decibel, which is absolutely nothing like the former establishment except that it’s also in a basement and feels like a total secret even though it is not. It’s about 100 times more homey, and about a hundredth the size, one of the places that makes the East Village a kind of Japanese hot spot. Search Japanese/East Village at nytimes.com/dining, and you’ll find a bunch, including a traditional izakaya called Kasadela, where the bar snacks are tasty, the sake well chilled and well explained, and the service attentive — a sort of extreme friendliness tinged with mild panic. It feels very Japanese, despite the American crowd.

Another East Village option is Satsko, which is, by all appearances, a regular old East Village bar of regulars (many of whose pictures are on the wall). It just happens to be about sake, with a small menu that can be described as pan-Asian plus guacamole. It also has a larger spot on the Lower East Side with a bigger menu, and both places serve 30-plus sakes to a 30-plus crowd. Both serve a house nigori (unfiltered sake) in a generous pour for a bargain $8 ($4 from 5 to 8 p.m.). It’s served in a traditional masu box, though you can ask for a wineglass if you’d like to study the cloudiness created by the rice sediment.

The humongous and high-ceilinged yet subtly marked behemoth called En Japanese Brasserie sits like a quiet monster across the street from a block of much more homey-looking West Village businesses. The Times’s restaurant critic Frank Bruni gave it a mixed review in 2004, giving it one star and noting “scattershot performance” on the food. But you can give it a test run at the bar, since there’s a bargain $18 three-sake tasting, served to you in glasses chilled by a bowl of crushed ice, until 7:30 p.m. daily. It comes with a huge bucket of salty root vegetable chips, and you can order three appetizers for $15, including the okara, described on the menu as “fibrous byproduct in the making of soy milk” mixed with vegetables. Say what you will about fibrous byproducts, but this one is a winner.

Chibi’s Bar in SoHo wins the award for most unlikely sake bar, serving essentially as the back room for the Dutch owner’s Japanese-influenced European restaurant, the Kitchen Club. Chibi is the owner’s French bulldog, which, if you miss it in the bar itself, you can meet virtually — photos are all over the Web site. This is the restaurant’s second summer with outdoor seating on a quiet block, where a cute little sake carafe goes well with its tempting mixed dumplings (of late, duck and ginger, shrimp and spinach, tofu and chrysanthemum and mushroom). Sake-haters can try a small but intriguing Belgium-meets-Sapporo beer list.

Donburi-Ya in Midtown has very little Midtown flair, but that makes it genuine and fun and popular among Japanese ex-pats. The somewhat confusing menu with garish color photos makes ordering a bit random, and prices change depending on the time, or so it seems. (One waitress explained, the “Mid Night” menu is actually the post-dinner, not post-midnight menu, which goes into effect at 11 p.m., but really at 10:40 since that’s when the last pre-11 p.m. orders must go in. She explained this at 10:43.)

But being confused is part of the fun, and the place is not expensive. It also has reasonable prices on shochu, which can be distilled from rice but is definitely not sake. Try both, appreciate the difference and let the rest of the city split hairs over malbec versus shiraz.

SO SET 'EM UP, KAZUO

Chibi’s Bar, 238 Mott Street, at Prince Street; (212) 274-0025; www.chibisbar.com.

Decibel, 240 East Ninth Street; (212) 979-2733; www.sakebardecibel.com.

Donburi-Ya, 137 East 47th Street; (212) 980-7909.

En Japanese Brasserie, 435 Hudson Street, at Leroy Street; (212) 647-9196; www.enjb.com.

Kasadela, 647 East 11th Street; (212) 777-1582; www.kasadela.com.

Sakagura, 211 East 43rd Street, enter through lobby; (212) 953-7253; www.sakagura.com.

Sake Bar Satsko, 202 East Seventh Street; (212) 614-0933; and 245 Eldridge Street, between Houston and Stanton Streets; (212) 358-7773; www.satsko.com.

Beer-Drinking Tree Shrews: Sober As Judges

Beer-Drinking Tree Shrews: Sober As Judges

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Pentail tree shrew with a radio collar.

A pentail tree shrew in the wild, wearing a small radio collar. Courtesy of Annette Zitzmann

All Things Considered, July 28, 2008 · In the rain forest of Malaysia, scientists have found a small mammal, closely related to primates, whose major source of food is a type of beer.

It's believed to be the only animal other than humans that chronically consumes alcohol. But this animal never appears drunk, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This little critter, the pentail tree shrew, is about 4 inches long; it weighs just a few ounces.

"It looks like a mix between a squirrel and a mouse," says Frank Weins, a biologist from Bayreuth University in Germany, who lived in western Malaysia studying these tiny mammals.

"They have this very strange naked tail. The tip looks like a bird feather."

With big eyes that face forward, and tiny grasping fingers and toes, the tree shrew is an evolutionary cousin of primates. They're nocturnal and spend most nights out in the jungle drinking nectar.

"They walk up and down the cluster of flowers and lick off nectar from the different flower buds," Weins says.

But they have one favorite food source: the bertam palm, whose flowers have a very strong and distinctive smell. "They smell like a brewery," Weins says.

In fact, the flower buds function as brewing chambers — they have been invaded by previously unknown species of yeast, which ferment the nectar into frothy alcohol.

"The maximum alcohol concentration that we recorded was 3.8 percent," Weins says. "That's in the range of a beer."

And the tree shrews spend several hours each night drinking this palm beer. Weins calculates that the tree shrew is imbibing what would be the human equivalent of nine glasses of wine an evening. However, the pentail tree shrew shows no signs of being drunk.

"They move normally on the palms when they go for the nectar," Weins says. "There's no sign of motor incoordination or other odd behaviors. They just move as efficiently as they would on any other tree."

Weins says there are no pentail tree shrews in captivity, so it hasn't been possible to do lab tests to detect intoxication.

But with jungle predators always lurking, Weins says, it would be very risky for a little mammal in the wild to be tipsy or drunk.

And that leads Weins to believe that the tree shrew probably has a specially evolved metabolism that detoxifies the alcohol quickly, keeping the alcohol concentration in the brain very low.

As a result, the tree shrew is able to detoxify alcohol more efficiently than its primate cousins: humans.

玉泉法國紅葡萄酒

玉泉法國紅葡萄酒
【玉泉法國紅葡萄酒】
分類洋酒類
編號6700164
建議售價NT$200
單位
PHRASE 玉泉
OTHER  
KIND 財經組織
SOURCE 中央13(10/27/87)
EXPLAIN  
EX 臺灣省菸酒公賣局即將在十一月中旬推出以OEM方式委託國外酒廠製造的玉泉紅葡萄酒。〔中央13(10/27/87)〕
PHRASE 玉泉法國紅葡萄酒
OTHER  
KIND 食品
SOURCE 中央13(11/09/87)
EXPLAIN  
EX 臺灣省菸酒公賣局首次委託國外酒廠製造的玉泉法國紅葡萄酒……正式在臺上市。〔中央13(11/09/87)〕

購物中心:綜合類白米香菸類啤酒類玉露系列生技產品:玉泉系列:玉山系列

產品代碼

品名

包裝(公升)

單位

批發價()

建議售價()

備註

211009

玉泉罈裝花雕酒

1.8

 

800

210100

玉泉紹興酒

0.6

 

160

空瓶可退

210200

玉泉陳年紹興酒

0.6

 

180

空瓶可退

211900

玉泉精釀陳年紹興酒

0.6

 

250

210208

玉泉罈裝特級陳年紹興酒

1.2

 

600

210306

玉泉黃酒

0.6

 

150

空瓶可退

213500

玉泉特級紅露酒

0.6

 

130

空瓶可退

213400

玉泉清酒

0.6

 

155

空瓶可退

221600

玉泉特級紅葡萄酒

0.6

 

180

220900

玉泉特級玫瑰紅酒

0.6

 

150

221500

玉泉金香白葡萄酒

0.6

 

150

260800

玉泉特級烏梅酒

0.6

 

160

221700

玉泉荔枝酒

0.6

 

150

260700

玉泉梅酒(無果粒)

0.6

 

180

260300

玉泉梅酒(含果粒)

0.6

 

300

260608

玉泉愛可涼酒(梅子)

0.25

 

35

260508

玉泉愛可涼酒(紅葡萄)

0.25

 

35

260908

玉泉愛可涼酒(荔枝)

0.25

 

35

214705

玉泉冰飲清酒

0.5

 

200

214800

玉泉十年窖藏精釀陳紹

0.6

 

300

214801

玉泉十年窖藏精釀陳紹

3.0

 

1500

261006

玉泉野櫻莓紅酒

0.4

 

250

215800

玉泉醉舞清酒

0.6

 

180

222002

玉泉紅麴葡萄酒

0.75

 

300

222202

玉泉極品紅麴葡萄酒

0.75

 

500

222209

玉泉極品紅麴葡萄酒禮盒(2瓶裝)

 

1000

222302

玉泉珍藏紅麴葡萄酒禮盒(單瓶)

0.75

 

1000

252905

玉泉葡萄寡糖酒醋

0.52

 

250

252805

玉泉蘋果寡糖酒醋

0.52

 

250

252705

玉泉檸檬寡糖酒醋

0.52

 

250

342002

玉泉金桔檸檬寡糖果醋

0.6

 

150

342003

玉泉紅葡萄籽寡糖果醋

0.6

 

150

6700164

玉泉法國紅葡萄酒

0.75

 

200

 

2008年7月14日 星期一

Anheuser, InBev Reach A Deal for $52 Billion

TOP STORY

Anheuser, InBev Reach
A Deal for $52 Billion

By DAVID KESMODEL, DENNIS K. BERMAN and DANA CIMILLUCA

Anheuser-Busch Cos. agreed to be acquired by InBev NV for about $52 billion, creating the world's largest beer maker and placing an iconic American company in the hands of a Belgian-Brazilian giant.

The $70-a-share deal marks an abrupt end to what many expected to be a prolonged takeover drama. For weeks, Anheuser showed stiff resistance to a sale. But last week, InBev, based in Leuven, Belgium, drew its St. Louis rival into friendly discussions by increasing its original cash offer by $5 a share.

The companies plan to call the new brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev. Anheuser will have two seats on the board. The board, which will include Anheuser-Busch President and Chief Executive August Busch IV, will have 14 members, up from 12 currently on the InBev board.

The deal caps Anheuser's roughly 150 years of independence and will create a global juggernaut. The new company will have net sales of about $36 billion a year, followed in size by London's SABMiller PLC. The two companies have about 300 brands, including Anheuser's Budweiser and Bud Light and InBev's Stella Artois and Beck's.

The agreement is evidence that even though the global mergers-and-acquisitions market has slowed as a result of the credit crisis, the appetite of many corporations for takeovers is still strong. It also shows that banks, despite the losses they have suffered on risky debt they took on in recent years, are willing to open their checkbooks to help fund combinations of strong companies.

The tie-up carries significant risks for InBev. Most of Anheuser's profit comes from the U.S. market, which is growing at a slow clip. Mass-market brewers face rising competition in the U.S. from small-batch "craft" beers, wines and spirits.

InBev and Anheuser don't have much overlap around the globe, so cost cuts from combining staffing and brewing operations may be harder to achieve than in other major beer-industry deals.

The deal with InBev closes the book on an American corporate dynasty. Anheuser and its predecessor companies have been led by members of the Anheuser or Busch families for most of the past 156 years.

Mr. Busch told beer distributors in April, before a formal bid materialized, that a sale wouldn't happen "on my watch." But the Busch family owns a small fraction of the company's stock, and Anheuser's directors were sensitive to their duty to serve public shareholders. Mr. Busch met with InBev CEO Carlos Brito in New York Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Anheuser had few options to evade InBev. It approached its Mexican partner, Grupo Modelo SA, about buying the half of the brewer it doesn't already own, a move that might have made the U.S. brewer too expensive for InBev. But those talks fell through, say people familiar with the matter.

On June 26, Anheuser's board formally rejected InBev's original proposal of $65 a share, saying it substantially undervalued the dominant U.S. beer maker. However, the board indicated that it would be open to a higher price.

The takeover battle grew increasingly hostile. Last week, InBev began trying to sack Anheuser's board. Meanwhile, Anheuser sued InBev, accusing it of lying about its lending commitments.

The sale price marks a significant premium to where Anheuser shares traded before speculation of a deal emerged earlier this year. Anheuser shares had languished at about $50 a share for about five years. Before the rumors surfaced this spring, the stock's previous high was $54.97, in October 2002. The company's shares closed at $66.50 in 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading Friday.

The deal sets up a battle in the U.S. beer market between two foreign giants: Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller. The shift is likely to result in a leaner industry with fewer employees, but consumers probably won't benefit from the price wars they have enjoyed in the past.

The U.S. brewing industry will enter an era "where gaining market share is not going to be nearly as important as running costs out of the system," said Harry Schuhmacher, editor of industry newsletter Beer Business Daily. "It's been a pretty fat industry. Everybody has enjoyed a lot of perks, and there are a lot of people in the industry, probably too many."

The combination of InBev and Anheuser, along with the recently formed MillerCoors LLC, will together control about 80% of beer sales in the U.S., the world's largest beer market in terms of profit. MillerCoors is the recently completed joint venture combining the U.S. and Puerto Rican operations of Miller Brewing, the U.S. unit of SABMiller, and Coors Brewing, the American arm of Molson Coors Brewing Co. of Denver and Montreal. Anheuser controls nearly half the market and MillerCoors about 30%.

The reshaping of the U.S. beer sector in the past year has been driven by lackluster sales growth for mass-market brews such as Miller Lite and Budweiser and the desire by global brewers to gain economies of scale amid rising costs for commodities such as barley, aluminum and glass.

For years, Anheuser and Miller took jabs at each other's products in advertisements. And they often engaged in price wars to try to filch market share from each other. When Anheuser slashed prices in 2005, it was a boon to beer drinkers but reduced profits for the major beer makers.

Lately, the companies have been raising prices, in part to cover higher commodities costs.

A new industry architecture led by InBev, SABMiller and its partner, Molson Coors Brewing, is expected to focus more heavily on cost cutting.

MillerCoors is likely to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming months as Miller and Coors combine sales, marketing and other employee groups, says Benj Steinman, editor of industry newsletter Beer Marketer's Insights.

Meanwhile, Anheuser laid out plans to cut about 1,000 full-time salaried workers this quarter as part of an alternative to an accord with InBev. "You have to imagine InBev will go to that" level of head-count reductions, Mr. Steinman said.

The beer companies also are expected to stop selling certain packages or versions of their beers to trim costs, among other efforts to become more efficient.

InBev's corporate culture is focused heavily on cost controls, so some analysts think the company would take steps to slash Anheuser's hefty marketing budget, which could harm its brands. But Mr. Brito, InBev's chief executive, "is emphatic...that they would be nuts to mess up the business Anheuser has built," said Mr. Steinman. "The smart idea is to keep what's going right at A-B."

The increased consolidation of the U.S. beer industry worries some of the nation's smaller brewers, who fear they may have a harder time gaining distribution. "It narrows the options for small brewers to gain access to market," said Kim Jordan, chief executive of craft brewer New Belgium Brewing Co. of Fort Collins, Colo. "Recently, we've seen more interest among the Anheuser-Busch distributors in our products than ever before," but that might change with InBev running Anheuser.

The combination of Anheuser and InBev won't result in major changes to the lineup of beers sold by Anheuser's distributors. Many of them already sell InBev's European brews, such as Stella Artois, under an import deal between Anheuser and InBev that began last year. But the tie-up between Anheuser and InBev means that InBev's Canadian brands, such as Labatt Blue, will be part of the combined company.