Brewing with Friends - Be Easy Brewing

This time, we’re hooking up with a dear old friend: Be Easy Brewing. Based out of Hirosaki, Aomori, Be Easy has been brewing beers since 2016. The owner, Gareth, is a great guy. But we’re also biased in our love for him because of our mutual love for Aomori (for the KBC founders, this was where we did our first job out of university as 社会人) .

Our original collab (brewed in 2018) resulted in a Sour Belgian Wit being brewed on our side and Matcha Milkshake IPA on theirs. This time, as we were exchanging ideas on what to brew, the idea of spruce tips came about. It turns out that Gareth has wanted to brew one for a long time. Unfortunately, given the timing of the collab, we had to temporarily park that idea but it lead us to the idea of brewing a beer on both sides using wood.

In Kyoto, thinking of all the trees around us and in the food you frequent when going into a Kyomachiya, sugi (Japanese cedar) was proposed and subsequently sent to Aomori. On the flip side, when thinking of prominent wood in Aomori, hiba (Japanese cypress) was proposed and soon sent our way.

In sampling the wood, we noticed that when toasted, hiba provided a nice soft vanilla character. We decided to combine that character with some nice herbal spice from the non-toasted version. To ensure that the characters of the wood would still be able to shine through, we brewed an amber lager. The idea was that the darker malt colours would pair well with the vanilla notes and the noble hop char of Tettnang would pair well with the herbal spiciness.

As was mentioned above, we temporarily parked the idea of doing a spruce tip beer; however, with spring just around the corner, we’ll hopefully soon to be able to collaborate with our friend again soon. In the meantime, please enjoy our newest collab with our dear friend.