At the start of the year, in our post looking ahead to 2025, Ben said, “If the first half of 2024 was chaotic, the first half of 2025 is likely to be insane”.  Given that we kicked off with such a statement, it’s hardly a surprise when we say that it was, indeed, insane.  Our rate of production - both of one-off releases and collaboration brews - was another level to anything we had ever reached before. 

This peaked with our 10 Year Anniversary event, Naminamito, where the 20 breweries with who we had collaborated with in the year and change since head brewer James first set foot in Japan all came down to join us.  Having never held a festival ourselves, this was an intensely intimidating task.  Right in front of Higashihonganji, the enormous entrance gate to the temple was either going to become a symbol of the event’s epicness, or an unwanted contrast to its immense failure.  We had breweries from Aomori right down to Shikoku, and even one from Canada, all showing up in person to serve the beers.  The pressure was immense, and heavily shouldered by our team members, especially Haruka “Bakki” Tsubakino and Kazuko “Zun” Ode. 

In the end, thanks to their immense effort and determination, the event was a success beyond our wildest hopes, and despite the grey and slightly rainy start, we ended up only wishing that we had asked for more beer to be provided by the attending breweries, and that we had asked for about double the number of attending kitchen cars to satiate the boozy appetites. 

More Madnes and Mayhem 

What we perhaps had been a little optimistic about was the thought that the chaos would ease off from the Summer.  Ask any of our members, and they will almost certainly tell you that getting easy was something that never happened. 

It wasn’t only the events side of things that were hectic for us this last year.  Our drive to reinvigorate our beer program, starting in 2024, reached peak pace in 2025.  After reengaging with the beer industry through collaborations in 2024, we went a step further and collaborated 16 times in 2025.  Each of these collaborations involved a huge amount of back and forth with our partner brewery, exchanging experience and knowledge, sharing collective creativity in coming up with ideas for what cool concepts we could come up with.  Not only that, but we typically did all the same at the partner sites, making it more than 30 beers brewed together with our brothers in arms, and all the travel to one another’s sites that involved. 

All in all, we have made 92 different products this year (including our 3 year-round beers) - comfortably a new record for us, beating even the crazy number we hit in 2024.  No, the brew team certainly have not had an easy time of it in 2025, either, and we are very aware of this. 

While we were successful in bringing back some spontaneity and increasing our sense of exploration and creativity, and while flexibility is something that a company of our small size should use to its advantage, we are perhaps now a bit too big to fly by the seat of our pants.  We have spent the latter part of the year focusing on plans on how best to move forward with everything we have learned this year, and how we need to shift in light of the current craft beer landscape in Japan. 

Realigning and Readying for The Next 10 Years 

And this market has truly changed quite significantly.  Gone are the days like those when we started in 2015, when a total of 4 breweries including our own opened.  At that time, if a new brewery opened - if it even sold beer outside of its own bar or town - it was a big deal to all the bars and restaurants.  Were the brewery one of expectation, everyone would want to get their hands on a keg to try.  Nowadays there are about 4 new breweries opening every week.  Truth be told, it is incredibly hard to keep up and know what is going on, even if you are working in the industry. 

A busy brewery scene with lots of options, and with the overall quality increasing, is a healthy thing in general.  What is apparent, however, is that this market is no longer able to keep up with the intense rate of new openings.  When we started, most breweries’ beer went to the Kanto region, and it felt that there was almost a bottomless demand.  Nowadays it is not good enough to just make good beer. 

The more positive flip side of this situation, however, is that breweries need to innovate and evolve to stay relevant.  This means that, while IPAs remain king on a general level, different beer styles now have sub-styles, and therefore something to please everyone, and then some.  And if you want to focus on making classic styles, or good old fashioned high impact IPAs?  Well, then you better do them really damn well, take some extra steps to make them the very best they can be, and work to make sure your ingredients are of a superb standard. 

Beating the Odds and Preparing for the Future 

While hard to summarise, 2025 is a historical one for Kyoto Brewing.  According to Nikkei Business, less than 10% of companies survive to see their 10 year anniversary, and it is often seen as a landmark, when a company shifts away from being a startup. 

While being a “stable company” is something we will fall short of claiming, we have invested a lot of money, energy and time over the past year into shelf longevity; the ultimate goal to being around for at least another 10 more years. With that goal locked in place, we constructed a lab in our brewery and kitted it out with a dizzying array of equipment to benchmark our beers. We then took a hard look at all processes that go into our making beer, with an eye towards keeping oxygen levels, the biggest enemy to flavour development and shelf-life stability, as low as possible.  

The result is that the average amount of oxygen in our cans is comparable to some of our compatriots in the industry that we have long held in high esteem (for those people in the industry, our average total packaged oxygen (TPO) is ~30ppb post packaging). With firm empirical evidence in hand, we have been slowly elongating the best before dates on our refrigerated only products across the board.  

We have also rolled out 2 ambient temp products: the Kyoto-only Habakarisan, a Belgian Wit featuring yuzu and sansho pepper; and Ichigo Ichie, our nationwide flagship saison. Traditionally, pasteurisation (ie. nuking the beer at a certain temp to kill the yeast and other potential spoilage bacteria) is a method employed by the big breweries to achieve this. Given that we feel passionate on not wanting to pasteurise our products as we believe that reduces the final taste of the product, we have instead embraced secondary fermentation, a method employed heavily by traditional breweries in Belgium, similar to champagne, to try and make the product as bulletproof as possible, whilst actually making certain styles noticeably better as products. 

We are also working towards putting ourselves back at the forefront by pushing boundaries, from the use of the latest hop varieties and hop products, and playing with new yeast strains and beer styles, taking inspiration from overseas and creativity from within, more than we have ever managed in the past. 

Despite all of that, and how hard everyone has had to work this year, the times ahead are far from plain sailing. 

So how are we going to approach 2026 and beyond, with all the challenges that the industry faces? 

One important element that we have started already with will be engaging directly with our customers in more ways, and our taproom has been the first example of that.  We have begun working on renovating our taproom, and this will be finalised at the start of the year, and will form the beginning of our shift to improving our onsite bar’s experience for the first time in many a year.  This will be just the beginning, though. 

We will soon share a post talking about our broader plans for 2026, and the year we foresee ahead. 

Paul and Ben, Co-Founders of Kyoto Brewing Co.