Czech-style pours are soooo 2025. 

We kid, of course. It’s safe to say that foamy pours like the hladinka, šnyt and mlíko have proven to be more than a passing fad, and more taprooms than ever are embracing the style. But the craft beer industry is not one to rest on its laurels, and now it seems there’s a new pour in town.

Japanese-style sharp pours have recently shown up everywhere from Seattle to Philadelphia to Salem, Massachusetts. Hopewell Brewing Co. in Chicago even named a beer after the move. While it’s recently landed stateside, it’s been a common pour style in Japan since  the late 1990s. Zigmas Maloni, curator and beertender at the Chicago bar Beermiscuous, credits Japanese beer behemoth Asahi for the sharp pour, which involves first pouring beer without foam, then capping it with foam to achieve a “golden ratio”: 70 percent liquid beer to 30 percent foam. Tapsters let the foam overflow so that when they scrape off the excess, there’s still a frothy head that fills to the top of the glass.

As we know from the advent of Czech-style pours, foam isn’t just for show; it impacts a beer’s texture and aroma. But while a Czech-style pour involves filling the glass with foam first, making the foam and beer mix freely in the glass to prioritize creaminess, a sharp pour does the opposite. The foam acts like a cap to keep effervescence—and a crisp, cold quality—intact.

By using this technique, tapsters are able to offer “that signature wet, dense, Lukr-like foam on top,” while enhancing a beer’s aroma, says Ryan Dunlap, owner of Argenta Brewing Company in Portland, Maine. Unlike a standard serve, where aromas might dissipate, a sharp pour traps the added carbon dioxide from pouring and amplifies these flavors. Dunlap says the method allows the floral notes in Argenta’s rice lager to shine through. 

Despite the differences, most American breweries use their Lukr taps for sharp pours, though a few, like Roaring Table Brewing Co. in Lake Zurich, Illinois, have the kind of two-spout faucet used in Japan: Pulling the handle forward dispenses beer from the rear spout, then pushing the handle back tops the beer with foam from the front spout. 

Maintaining a chilled temperature is essential for the sharp-pour process. At Argenta, Dunlap inverts tall glasses in sanitized hotel pans filled with ice water. “You want the glassware to be the same temperature as the beer because you’re trying to reduce any carbon dioxide breakout or foam building in the glass during the first part of the pour,” he explains. He rinses the glasses, fills them with the same two-step pour and then dunks them in an ice bucket to both clean and chill the glass one more time before serving. While any beer style benefits from this pour, lagers tend to get the sharp treatment because they’re best served by the crisp, cold results.

Part of the appeal for this method is also in the ritual. Colin Lenfesty, director of brewing and blending at Holy Mountain Brewing Company in Seattle, says he first tried a beer poured this way at Shimbashi Dry-Dock Tokyo, which is renowned for its perfect Asahi Super Dry pour. “The bartender went through an incredibly thoughtful ritual,” he says. “I knew right then and there we were going to try and do those pours justice at our bar.”

Others discovered the pour via social media. Jenny Pfäfflin, brewer at Chicago’s Dovetail Brewery, says in the early 2020s, she stumbled upon a video of Hiroshi Shigetomi of Hiroshima’s Beer Stand Shigetomi using the technique. “That really kicked off my interest. I saw a parallel between Japanese beer culture and Czech beer culture,” she says. “The obvious one is how both revere foam—how it’s formed, and how it affects flavor. But the other parallel is how they revere the tapster.” Pfäfflin later found and bookmarked Maloni’s sharp-pour videos on the Beermiscuous YouTube page and recruited Maloni himself as tapster for the first Dovetail Tachinomi—“standing-style drinking”—event.

Dunlap also discovered the style from Maloni’s videos, in addition to the ones from Perfect Beer Kitchen in Tokyo. Now he posts his own on Argenta’s social media channels. “People come in because of it,” he says. He theorizes that sharp pours are resonating because of growing interest in Japanese food and drink trends in general, and also because today’s guests are looking for an experience beyond just throwing back another beer they could have anywhere. “Having that hospitality and service lift is crucial,” he says. Especially with the rising costs of everything, having a bartender that knows the specifics of the beer glass, the proper temperature and the service method matters.

“There are so many places out there where you just line up, point at the number of the beer you want and move to the side,” says Lenfesty. “We want to give our guests a different experience, chat with them and let them know everything we do around here is with intention and care.”