Big Beers for a Big Day

We are now 2 weeks away from our 10 year anniversary event, Naminamito, and are in the midst of planning. After talking a fair bit about the event itself, we feel it’s about time we now get into the beer itself - please consider this blog as a bit of a teaser! As a reminder, we are selling advance tickets at a discounted rate up to the day before the event, so make sure to get yours in to enjoy ¥100 off each of your first 5 beers.

As a brewery, we often use the phrase “mazu wa biiru” (“everything starts with the beer”) and so we of course couldn’t have an anniversary event without a special anniversary beer to go along with it!

A Big Beer for a Big Occasion

We had a long hard think about what we should do for our anniversary brew. For our 1 year anniversary, we went for Nidomemashite, our first Double IPA, and the biggest and hoppiest beer made to date at the time. But we don’t want to just keep “going bigger” and making a hoppier beer. Where do we go for something as significant a landmark as our 10 year anniversary?

We thought and thought and we decided we wanted to go back to our beginnings and make something that really meant something. And for that, we also wanted to make it extra special by going back to someone who is hugely important to us, not only as a friend, but as someone involved in KBC’s very beginnings: Luc Lafontaine of Godspeed Brewery. As to our history with Luc, and why he means so much to us, I’ll leave it to a future blog, where we go into much more detail on our history with Luc and the beer itself.

So, those with a good knowledge of the beginnings of KBC might just recall our early days collaboration with Luc, a beer that we decided to call “Himitsu”, or secret. We’ll leave this beer as another “Himitsu” for now, but I will just share that we really got our creative juices flowing for this beer, and it’s fair to say that this is a beer on the wilder side of our spectrum. It’s a collaboration that involved lots of thought and back-and-forth on how we would make it happen, and we are pretty excited about how it might come together!

Another Anniversary Brew for the Day

We think and hope that people will love our collaboration with Luc, but it’ll definitely be a beer on the bigger side, so we also wanted to make something super drinkable and enjoyable for the day. We thought back to one of our popular brews from yesteryear, a one off called “Dirty Little Secret" (後ろめたい秘密). This beer’s concept was to be a beer for brewers at festivals, with the knowledge that brewers secretly often don’t choose a beer at the end of a long day serving at a festival, but rather a lemon sour! The idea was to make a light and refreshing beer, dry and with fruity hops, that would give a similar kind of refreshment.

We didn’t want to just do the same thing as before, though, and so have decided to go instead with a lager. What we did attempt was to repeat was a crisp and dry character, and also to feature the fruity hop characters that work as a great substitute for lemon, and so we went for Kohia Nelson, Motueka, and Riwaka for sweet citrus and tropical character. What we also did this time, and for the very first time, was to referment this lager in package, just like we do with our more traditional Belgian style beers. What this does, aside from making the beer last longer, is to give a different fineness of foam and improved head retention, as well as to create a higher carbonation, making the beer spritzier than would be possible with forced carbonation, much like a champagne.

A Special Beer to Take Away

We have a very limited number of the last of our barrel-aged Pilgrim’s Respite beers, our Katsumei BA Ver for sale. This is a mixed grain saison that we added further complexity by putting it for 15 months in barrels with a range of microbes including Lactobacillus. We have then since let it mature another 2 years in bottle, keeping it for a special occasion. After taste testing recently, and feeling it is peaking, we have given it a year from now within which we are setting its BBD, but this could potentially develop even further. We’ll certainly be keeping a few bottles aside for trying ourselves further down the road!

A Huge Selection from the Breweries!

At the latest count, we’ll have a total of 125 different beers being brought to the event across the 23 booths, making it quite the selection.

Across the booths includes a fair number of collaboration brews, but our guests have also gone all out, and are bringing quite the range of rare kegs along as well. A special small mention to Be Easy Brewing, who went as far as to make a small batch of beer at their Aomori Brewpub just for Naminamito that will be available nowhere else!

The attending breweries are all bringing an amazing range of different beers, so we really don’t want to pigeonhole them. However, just to give a taste of what you can get excited about, here is a brief hint of some of what they’ll be bringing along!

Collaborations with KBC at Other Booths:
Nara Brewing, Two Rabbits, Yamorido, Kyoto Beer Lab, Black Tide, Sakamichi Brewing, Kyoto Nude Brewery, Y Market Special

Naminamito Originals:
Be Easy Brewing, Kyoto Brewing

Special Barrel and Foeder Aged Beers:
Zakkoku Koubo, Minoh Beer

Hop Superstar Lineup:
West Coast Brewing, Totopia Brewery, Vertere

Fruit masters:
DD4D, Kyoto Beer Lab

World Class Lagers:
Godspeed Brewery, Kobo Brewery, Yatsugatake Beer

KBC Old Boy Group:
Ape Brewing, Flora Fermentation, Nara Brewing, Nude Brewery, Yamorido