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Why Asahi and Manchester City make a great team: we look inside the Japanese beer’s timely partnership with football’s reigning treble winners – and find out how Super Dry pilsner is being reimagined

Man City star striker Erling Haaland in the team’s new training shirt, sponsored by Asahi Super Dry 0.0%. Photo: Getty
Man City star striker Erling Haaland in the team’s new training shirt, sponsored by Asahi Super Dry 0.0%. Photo: Getty

  • Last season, MCFC became the second English club ever to win the ‘treble’ of the Premier League, FA Cup and Uefa Champions League – and beat Sevilla to win the Uefa Super Cup on August 16
  • Did Erling Haaland and co celebrate by knocking back some beers? We visited Tokyo’s Asahi Super Dry factory to sample the new ‘2.0’ brew, quietly rolling out in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Singapore

Japan’s bestselling beer might have already gone global – but we’d wager many more mouths will be gulping down Asahi lager in the months ahead. Sports fans are notoriously thirsty, after all, and last month Asahi Super Dry 0.0% was announced as official training kit sponsor of Manchester City Football Club – many people’s pick as the best football team in the world right now.

When the five-year deal was inked last year, Asahi execs could have only fervently hoped that City would close the 2022/23 season by becoming the second English club ever to win “the treble” of the Premier League, FA Cup and Uefa Champions League. Then, on August 16, they added the 2023 Uefa Super Cup to the pile, traditionally a form of curtain raiser to a new European football season.

Former Man City players Shaun Wright-Phillips (left) and Joleon Lescott with the FA Cup and Premier League trophies at an Asahi launch party in Shibuya, Tokyo. Photo: Handout
Former Man City players Shaun Wright-Phillips (left) and Joleon Lescott with the FA Cup and Premier League trophies at an Asahi launch party in Shibuya, Tokyo. Photo: Handout
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With news that the first two of those trophies would be in Tokyo to mark the partnership, we jumped on a Japan-bound flight in late July to visit the home of Asahi, and find out more about its most timely collaboration with 2023’s most-decorated football club.

Inside the Super Dry factory

The unassuming exterior of the Asahi factory in Moriya, north of Tokyo. Photo: Handout
The unassuming exterior of the Asahi factory in Moriya, north of Tokyo. Photo: Handout

The Asahi group is a veritable behemoth that owns a dozen brands, from Wonda ice coffee and Nikka whisky to competing beers Peroni and Pilsner Urquell. It also produces a range of beers bearing the Asahi label, but it’s the flagship Super Dry that is most associated with the brand.

Our first stop? Finding out where that hoppy brew comes from. Style paid a visit to the biggest of the brand’s five breweries at Moriya, in Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo – a sprawling facility which produces a mouthwatering 5.9 million cans of beer a day. Amazingly, it claims to be entirely carbon neutral.

Inspection time at the Asahi brewery at Moriya, north of Tokyo. Photo: Handout
Inspection time at the Asahi brewery at Moriya, north of Tokyo. Photo: Handout

As well as tracing the beer’s rapid ascent since being launched in 1987, the earnest and authoritative Asahi Super Dry Museum even includes a hi-tech 6D cinema ride where viewers take the simulated journey of a beer can through the factory, complete with puffs of air and splashes of water.