Arya News - The Kiuchi Sake Brewery in Ibaraki`s Naka district, founded in 1823, helped spark Japan`s craft beer boom with its trailblazing Hitachino Nest Beer in 1996 — and has since pushed deeper into local-first production.
TOKYO – In 1823, the village headman of Konosu in the county of Naka in Hitachi (the old name for Ibaraki Prefecture) began brewing sake. About 170 years later, a 1994 revision to the Liquor Tax Law opened the door to beer production on a small scale. This led to more than 200 new breweries popping up nationwide and created a craft beer boom. A trailblazer of this boom was Hitachino Nest Beer, which went on sale in 1996 from Kiuchi Sake Brewery Co., the direct descendant of the brewery started by the Konosu headman, Gihei Kiuchi.
In 2007, Kiuchi Sake Brewery collaborated with local farmers to revive a barley variety that had not been grown since around 1960, and started using it to brew beer. Nipponia, another craft beer brand the company produced using all-domestic ingredients — the malt, hops and Yamada-Nishiki sake rice — became popular not only in Japan but overseas as well.
“Making sake should go hand in hand with agricultural tradition and culture,” said Kyoshiro Imaizumi of Yasato Distillery, which the company founded in 2020. “We stick to using barley and rice grown in Ibaraki Prefecture not only for our beer but also our whiskies.”
Locally grown barley to be malted.
The distillery stands in a farming area in Ishioka, in the prefecture, close to Mt. Tsukuba. Since its establishment, the distillery has produced grain whiskies made from rice and wheat grown in the prefecture.
“We started making whisky partly to use barley that didn’t meet the standard for brewing beer,” Imaizumi said. “When we began making whisky in a corner of our beer brewery in 2016, we initially used imported malt. Three years ago, we built a malting factory for locally produced barley.”
The company has harnessed the knowledge and techniques honed through its beer brewing business for making whisky as well.
“ ly, the lauter tun and the mash tun are combined into a single vessel, but we have separate tuns, each with its own temperature control, just as we do for making beer. This allows us to increase the volume of yeast and produce a very aromatic wort,” Imaizumi said.
Pot stills for whiskey built in Scotland have been installed in Kiuchi Sake Brewery’s Yasato Distillery in Ishioka, Ibaraki Prefecture.
Wort is added to yeast and left for three days inside a stainless fermentation vessel. The wort is then moved to a wooden fermentation vessel for another two days to produce a fermentation broth rich in bacteria that turn sugars into lactic acid. This broth is transferred to pot stills for distillation. A storage house adjacent to the factory contains barrels for bourbon and sherry, in addition to original barrels made from cherry trees that epitomize the company’s determination to make the entire process as Japanese as possible. Currently they have about 5,000 barrels full of liquors and other alcoholic drinks, maturing in accordance with the local climate and without temperature and humidity controls.
Four years ago, the company rolled out the first edition of a whisky named Hinomaru — literally “the circle of the sun,” which features on Japan’s national flag and embodies the company’s commitment to and pride in using domestic ingredients. Since then, the company has produced limited editions of the whisky each year, including three standard choices: Signature 1823, Kome and Sakura Ra. Signature 1823 is the brand’s hallmark single malt whisky and won top prizes at several competitions last year. Kome is a blended whisky with a mild sweetness and solid body, and Sakura Ra is matured in various barrels, such as cherry wood and cherry brandy barrels, and characterized by a sweet, vibrant fragrance.
A shop at Yasato Distillery sells various products, such as ham made from pigs fed with malt meal.
“The taste [of a whisky] takes time to complete, so it’s difficult but also interesting,” Imaizumi said with a sparkle in his eyes. “I hope our whiskies will convey to the world what makes this area special.”
Ishioka sits in one of eastern Japan’s richest grain-growing regions and is blessed with ample underflow water from Mt. Tsukuba. In this vast farming area, Yasato Distillery and Imaizumi will continue to take on new challenges.