Japanese brewers found a unique way to make beer more affordable: use less malt. But what happens when using less malt no longer makes these products cheaper? To answer this, we must look back more than a century. During the Meiji era of 1868 to 1912, the Japanese government increasingly relied on liquor taxes as the country industrialized. By the early 1900s, liquor taxes ranked among Japan’s largest source of national tax revenue.