Brewing with Friends - Flora Fermentation
The nakame (friendship) series is our collab series and KBC has been on a tear for the greater part of the year. As was explained, we’ve focused not only on doing collabs with breweries we view as our peers but also with breweries where the owner or head brewer was someone who worked at KBC – our OB (Old Boy/Girl) series. So far, we’ve collab’ed with Nara Brewing (Dream of Two Cities - Milk Stout), Yamorido (Kitsunebi – Barley Wine w/ Kyobancha) and Ape Brewing (Masu Masu Hamaru - Special Bitter).
Next up? Our collab is with Flora Fermentation (herein Flora) and this is their story.
In May 2023, as we were pouring beers at Mikkeller’s Keep Pouring Nippon festival, we were approached by a gentleman who told us that he was on a team of 3 and that they were looking to start a brewery in Shiga.
In order to acquire some experience while they were planning and building out their brewery, 1 founder was working at Nara Brewing, 1 founder was working at Hino Brewing and the last founder had recently moved to Japan and wanted to work at a brewery.
That person was Kai. Born and raised in Canada, Kai was working at Steel & Oak (S&O), a brewery based just outside of Vancouver. S&O focused almost exclusively on German style beers and had garnered several accolades. Kai had worked there for 3 years after getting out of brewing school.
He had always intended to move to Japan and was looking to transition to directly from S&O to Flora; however, Corona had taken its toll on the Vancouver craft beer scene and as a result of the turmoil, Kai decided it was best to come to Japan a little earlier than originally planned.
When we were approached about Kai working at KBC, Macchan (Ape Brewing) had recently left the company and Ayumu, our team lead, was about to go on paternity leave. The timing was fortuitous as Kai’s experience at another brewery meant he could be loaded with tasks and responsibility quite quickly.
That being said, Kai’s personality is a double-edged sword. His smile and jokes are infectious and the production floor had no shortage of laughs when he was around. Furthermore, he wants to push for change so that the result means things improve. However, sometimes that might mean his attention span on doing repetitive tasks the same way each time means he loses interest. Trying to leverage that, he was tasked with projects that lots of others tried to avoid. He helped overhaul our malt room and now it can store double the amount of malt there than before. Also, he was put in charge of helping us sort through and manage our dry goods storage area (cans, boxes, plastic cups, brewery parts, etc etc) and it now can store double the amount of stuff there than before.
Fast forward a few months and Kai soon found himself being in charge of packaging. Some days, the canning line operates like clockwork. Other days, nothing seems to go right. We thought such a capricious beast was a perfect opportunity for Kai. Our canning line is a Cask line. Cask is based in Calgary, Canada. When Cask came over to KBC to do some long-needed maintenance/overhaul, Kai soon found himself in charge and under his watchful gaze, about 1,000,000 cans of KBC beer were packaged. On the road toward that milesone of 1,000,000 was a lot of blood, sweat and tears (not to mention broken cans) as there was a huge push to lower oxygen levels (oxygen is the enemy to beer and makes it spoil faster). Kai, Ayumu and James (our head brewer) kicked, cursed and screamed and eventually the canning line was tamed and oxygen levels in our canned beer started to decline and we therefore were able to extend our best before dates across our many product lines (thank you, boys!)
When it was time to talk to Flora about what to do for the collab, because they had just gotten off the ground, the path of what beer styles they largely want to portfolio to encompass in the future has not been set and they are brewing a wide array of beers styles (ex: from the Pukwudgie Juicy IPA to the Cascara Dunkel w/ Coffee Cherry and also the Befinita Saison w/ grape skins). Truly, with how crowded it is in the marketplace but also because of how few breweries there are in Shiga and also that all 3 founders worked at 3 very different breweries, this is a good opportunity for the locals there to get exposed to a wide variety of styles. With that in mind, we therefore thought it would be cool to go back in time to Kai’s experience at S&O and make something German.
We decided, given the time of year, to go for something a little burly. Also, because we had just brewed a series of crazy hoppy beers with our Gouketsu series, we wanted to focus on something malty - cue the Weizenbock.
Flora is taking the bold step of not only trying to brew beer but also growing some of the ingredients that go into their beer. Alongside German hops, we dosed the beer with some Shiga-grown Cascade that helped impart a soft bitterness alongside some nice floral and citrus notes.
