(FORTUNE Magazine) – American cars and supercomputers may be a hard sell, but the Japanese are confirmed fans of U.S. beer, quaffing ten million gallons of it last year. Enter the tiny (seven-employee) Brooklyn Brewery. The New York City company began exporting its lager to Japan in January and has already sold 147,456 bottles, about 15% of its output. Says President Steve Hindy, 41, a former AP reporter who started the business three years ago with Tom Potter, 34, previously a lending officer at Chemical Bank: ''We're doing our modest best to reduce the trade deficit.'' Any would-be exporter to Japan faces a byzantine distribution system. Luckily a Japanese oil executive who'd sampled the beer in the U.S. liked it enough to hook the company up with Hiroya Trading. The brewery exports some of its beer by air; those bottles sell for $15 each at Tokyo's ritzier nightspots. Suds shipped by sea sell for $4 to $5 a bottle in humbler taverns, about what they cost in Brooklyn. In baseball-batty Japan the ''B'' on the beer's label probably also boosts sales. It reminds customers of the erstwhile Brooklyn Dodgers. - R.J.

-- You name it: Scotch, jewelry, or condoms . . . Japanese consumers can buy just about anything from the vending machines that crowd Tokyo streets. Next machine offering: frozen U.S. beef. That's the hope of entrepreneur Haruhiko Saito, 54, currently an importer of U.S. offal. Now that Japan is dropping import quotas on U.S. beef, Saito wants to import it from Hamilton Meat, a San Diego packer, and sell it through custom-designed vending machines equipped with freezers, at $10.68 for a 16- ounce sirloin vs. the $17.70 charged by supermarkets. The hurdle: The Ministry of Health and Welfare has yet to conclude its studies on whether his machines keep the beef safely frozen. Meanwhile the U.S. embassy in Tokyo is doing a study of its own. It wants to find out whether vending machines could be the way for other American goods to enter the Japanese consumer market. - Susan Moffat