Colosseo 262 is the happening place where you can get fun beers from around Japan as well as a lot of Italian and Spanish dishes.  Colosseo often has a lot of business diners as the quality of their dishes are top notch.  Their main specialty is the homemade mayonnaise that is added to as many dishes as they can, but Taihei had to go with the No. 1 menu item, the sausage set.  The sausages are all made in house so you can impress your business counterparts by imparting a little wisdom about how they are made before you even ask the servers.  They use high quality pork and stuff chunks of pork belly throughout the sausage to create a wonderful chewy texture as well as adding more fatty goodness to each dish.

Sausage Set

The plain sausage was like a great newly hired graduate.  You aren’t expecting much from their idealistic ways, but they can surprise you and just like a newly hired graduate, the plain sausage worked hard for its money and delivered.  The natural flavours of the pork and the added spices really shine on its own without much help from other additions.  If you want, you can add a little grain mustard for variety.  For beers, you can pair this sausage with almost any beer on the menu, just as any wet around the ear kid, who can be dropped into any department.

We started with the Johana Tropical Pink, a fruit beer that is akin to a new transfer from another company; someone who is there to shake things up and doesn’t belong.  With the plain sausage, things didn’t match as the flavours of the sausage were muddled.    You are better off with keeping things simple, like the sausage.  Getting someone from the back office that has been around and dependable will pair much better with the sausage so go with a Pale Ale or a Red Ale.  The Deep Sky Red Ale from Barbaric Works really hit the spot with the plain sausage.  The marriage of caramel malts with the carbonation of the beer added to the fat from the pork belly.  The back-office worker really helped the new recruit be even better and worth their salt.

The herb sausage was like management.  It was seasoned and well balanced, yet can still punish you if you aren’t careful.  They added rosemary, basil, and sage to the mix that really kicked things up a notch.  The balance of herbs has been well developed so that none of the herbs overpowered the other and they complimented each other perfectly.  The kick of rosemary at first was similar to training a new recruit while the basil acted as a teacher to sooth the tongue.  The sage provided wisdom that put everything all together.

Like any good manager, this sausage went well with many different beer styles.  The fruit beer started to shine by helping to merge the flavours together and clean the palette.  Any effective manager is capable of working with any new transfer and getting the most out of them.  The red ale also did a good job of bringing out the inherent sweetness of the herbs as any back-office worker can attest, getting things done is the only way to keep the manager happy.

The CEO will always be the one to kick your ass, and the Jolokia (spicy pepper) sausage will be the one to do that.  When in Japan, people never think spicy food will actually be spicy, but the Jolokia, or ghost pepper, sausage had a bite that started off soft but hit in the middle and finished strong.  Just like the big boss man, you tend to underestimate them but once they get going, they do a quick one-two before finishing you off.  It was a pleasant surprise to see spicy food in Japan.

For those with a low tolerance to heat, the fruit beer will help relieve the pain in the same way someone from another company can’t get into a lot of trouble with the CEO as the CEO isn’t their boss.  Be careful of the fruity arrogance of the fruit beer as sometimes it spars with the spice of the peppers.  Red Ales are truly the back-office workers of beer in that it worked more to enhance the pepper’s heat in a good way.  The ghost pepper tends to hit the middle of the tongue with a tingling heat and the red ale worked its magic to spread it around.  Rather than letting the CEO push the workers around, the back-office worker was able to spread the workload to even out the heat and ensure a pleasant experience.

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