Our Cause

Our brewery is located in Niseko, Hokkaido. It sits in a peaceful setting, slightly away from the bustling ski resort, and is surrounded by forests, rice fields, fields, and farms.

When we embarked on this journey of making craft beer, we often received suggestions like, "Why not grow your own barley?" and "It would be nice to cultivate hops and use them for your craft beer." Although we found these ideas enticing, it seemed somewhat challenging to achieve our goal of creating craft beer that we could confidently enjoy, given that we had no experience in farming. For instance, popular hop varieties we wanted to use, such as "Amarillo," "Mosaic," and "Simcoe," are proprietary, and we cannot cultivate them freely. The hops that can be cultivated in Japan are mostly traditional varieties, and it is difficult to extract the trendy citrusy and tropical flavors from them.

We brew about 300L of craft beer at a time, which requires several times the volume of water. This includes not just the brewing water to extract sugars from malt, but also water for cleaning and cooling processes. Moreover, the carbon dioxide that characterizes beer is produced when yeast metabolizes sugars in the malt, but it's also common to add external carbon dioxide to adjust the drinking texture according to the style of the beer. This carbon dioxide is used in many steps of beer brewing to prevent contamination by bacteria or the entry of oxygen. After it has served its purpose, it is released into the atmosphere. These processes, the abundant use of water, and the release of carbon dioxide, are the aspects of craft beer brewing we find most undesirable.

Living in a naturally rich environment and brewing beer, we constantly feel the pressure to think about local production and conservation. This can be very tiring. That's why we've set a small goal of "crafting our beer here, in a way that imposes as little stress as possible on the environment." The phrase "A greener world" is not about a grand dream of the world turning green overnight, but a vision of making a little effort every day, so that tomorrow will be a little greener than today.

One of the ways we have adopted to achieve this is by using green energy. Luckily, our brewing process does not involve the use of fossil fuels; it operates solely on electricity. So, we decided to purchase efficiently produced green energy. Of course, this alone won't reduce our environmental impact, but it is part of our ongoing daily efforts to do so. The pressure of conservation can be burdensome, but finding solutions is a joy. We will continue to search for new ideas and conduct research towards realizing them.

Kosho Owa
Founder and Production Chief