Brewing with Friends - Godspeed Brewery

We are now 4 days away from our from our 10th anniversary event. Excitement at the company is now reaching fever pitch. The final set of beer that KBC will be pouring at the festival will be packaged this week and all the beer from our brewery friends will be arriving towards the end of the week and ferried to the event site.

As was mentioned in a previous post, we have decided to make not 1 but 2 beers specifically with the event in mind.

The first beer is a New Zealand Hoppy Pils that embodies a lot of the changes that have happened at our brewery since James arrived just a little over a year ago. The recipe begins with NorthStar Pilsner malt, a North American grown and malted grain that we have lovingly adopted at our brewery for our non-Belgian brews, and some rice flakes to make the beer clean and crushable. We then added a healthy dose of New Zealand hops to the mix to represent our embracing of New Zealand hops. We started with Freestyle Kohia Nelson and Freestyle Motueka on the brew day to give the beer a passionfruit and citrus lime character. In the cellar, we went for another heavy dose of hops, consisting of more of our early harvest Motueka and Eggers’ Special Riwaka, both of which have more of a sweet citrus tropical flavour and aroma than their more standard counterparts to further increase the beer’s drinkability and refreshing nature. We then added some more Motueka and Kohia Nelson before can + keg conditioning this beer over a few weeks to give the beer a bright natural carbonation, and locking in all of those wonderful aromatics. As the temperature starts to creep up as the festival further progresses through the day, this beer will be a nice little companion to slate your thirst.

The second beer is a beer that we have named ‘History’, symbolising not only 10 years of making and pouring suds but also our storied history with our good friend Luc Lafontaine from Godspeed Brewery.

Pre-formation Days:

When KBC only existed in napkin form, we had the opportunity to meet Luc. It was 2013 and Luc had just left Dieu du Ciel, then a world famous brewpub in Montreal, Canada, after 12 years as their brewer. He had moved to Japan to start a brewery together with the Ushitora crew. Ben and I (Paul) coincidentally lived in Shimo-Kitazawa, a neighbourhood just West of Yoyogi Park in Tokyo and Ushitora, at that time, consisted of 2 bars that occupied the same storey of a small building in the area. We frequented there often and one could say they were a source of inspiration for us wanting to get our own brewery off the ground due to the wonderful beers they had rotating on their menus and for all the great customers we came to know who also had an interest in craft beer.

When meeting Luc for the first time, ex-founder Chris passed him a green tea-infused IPA he had made and after explaining our plans about the brewery and for how Chris was going to soon intern at Shiga Kogen after finishing his stint at Port Brewing & Lost Abbey, Luc said that his brewery would likely be off the ground at that time and Chris could work at Ushitora with him until our own brewery plans firmed up.

In the end, Chris did move to Tochigi to join Luc after his time at Shiga Kogen but as we would also come to personally experience, breweries take a lot longer to get off the ground than you originally planned (not to mention more money!) and instead of brewing, Chris was there to help in construction efforts as they retrofitted an old brewhouse to be repurposed for Ushitora’s needs.

Early Days

As KBC got the money together and chose our site to get our brewery off the ground, it came time to move towards acquiring our system and Luc provided his continuous input despite him making the hard decision to eventually return to Canada.

When the system arrived and the brewery buildout was finished, the tax office visited for their long overdue final inspection. It was April 2015 and our carefully planned timelines were off by over 9 months. However, we were given the green-light from the tax office to brew and we asked Luc if he could join us and provide a steady hand of support as we got our initial batches of beer brewed - the 3rd batch culminating in our first collaboration.

For 2 weeks, we essentially lived in the brewery’s tatami room (unfortunately that room was sacrificed in our 3rd year of operation to expand our malt storage capacity at the brewery) before Luc temporarily left to Thailand to enjoy a slightly delayed honeymoon.

Post-honeymoon, Luc returned to Kyoto and helped us keg the same batches of beer we brewed with him a few weeks earlier. He also helped man our festival booth at the Kyoto Beer festival, our first opportunity to sell and pour beer for our new customers. The date was May 9th, 2015.

Those early days were very stressful days; however, having Luc’s support through the initial part of the gauntlet helped give us the confidence we needed to press onwards.

Formative Years

Fast forward nearly 5 years to Mar 2020. Luc had opened his brewery, Godspeed, in 2017 in Toronto and was visiting Japan for some much needed R&R.

Though not originally hailing from Japan, a lot of Luc’s life is intertwined with it and so when he launched his brewery, he thought it only natural that his beers would feature a Japanese theme throughout; whether it be in the adjuncts featured in his beers or in the artwork and names that graced his labels.

We had a chance to not only meet again and exchange war stories how each of our breweries was getting on but we decided to brew a beer together as an homage to Orval, a beer that both sides hold dear to us (details of the beer can be found here)

Unfortunately, given that Corona reared its ugly head only a month later, the celebration for the beer was quite muted as both sides were reeling from the impact of how to sell beer in a world where it was no longer easy to go to a bar or restaurant.

Interestingly, Luc’s journey through Corona saw him evolve into becoming known with brewing Czech-style beers. As for KBC, after months of forced toil on our undersized bottling line, we made a decision to rally behind cans and started getting picked up by supermarkets and department stores.

Coming out of Corona, both Godspeed and KBC had changed. In KBC’s case, after not only surviving Corona but growing quite a bit, Chris had decided that he wanted to bow out and take some time off to find out what he wanted to do in the next chapter of his life. As a founder, to help with the transition, he gave us a year to train-up the brew team and to give us enough time to do a proper search for a new head brewer.

Change of the Guard

A few months after Chris’ departure, we welcomed James to KBC and almost immediately, we embarked on a campaign to collaborate with a slew of breweries to introduce James to the Japan beer scene and reacquaint ourselves with new and old friends alike. At the top of our mind was Luc.

As the years have gone by, Luc took a look at his personal life and deemed that family was integral cornerstone and wanted to ensure his wife was happy and that his kids could grow up in a society that had had a profound impact on his life. With that in mind, Luc decided to split his time between Canada and Japan.

With easier access to Luc and Luc’s shift to mainly focus on Czech beers, we decided to do a 3-way collab w/ Luc and longterm Czech Japan-resident, Kot’as. Interestinly enough, given our US-style brewhouse limitation, we decided to forego a Czech beer and instead embraced Luc’s love of smoked beers. We opted to brew a Grodziskie, a Polish-style beer (details of the beer can be found here).

Seeing James positively respond to Luc’s sudden desire of lucky number ‘7’ to permeate everything in the recipe (timings for hops to be added every 7 minutes; amount of hops being added into the beer to be divisible by 7; etc) on the day of the brew, in the middle of the brew, it really felt like a whole weight had been lifted off my shoulders as Luc and James’ laugh signalled things were going to be just fine. *knock on wood*

Celebration Brew

With the idea of the celebration brew, James wanted to take the theme of smoke established in our previous collaboration with Luc a step further. Taking inspiration from a cocktail - in this case, an Old Fashioned, a drink that is mostly whisky with some bitters and sugar, with some orange peel added - James wanted fire/smoke to become an added element.

Before adding beer into the steel vessel we use to carbonate the beer, we loaded some oak chips into the tank on a platform, and removed a decent amount of oxygen from the tank with CO2. We then lit the wood chips on fire and closed the tank. The fire consumed the residual oxygen in the tank as we fed it with CO2 to prevent a vacuum - therefore potentially deforming the vessel - from forming. Quickly running out of oxygen, the fire went out, and the wood began to smoke vigorously; essentially turning the vessel into a smoke chamber. We then moved beer into the vessel to impart some of that smoke flavour, while also allowing it to rest on the now charred wood chips, giving the beer a soft vanilla and oak character.

This beer may be a first of its kind given that we are not sure many people would be willing to light fires in their BBT’s, but the character from it makes this beer very unique and truly special, which is only fitting for our 10th anniversary.

Explaining James’ idea to Luc, a smile spread across Luc’s face. In thinking of the best beer style to embody the Old Fashioned, we decided to brew a Wee Heavy, a Scottish style known for its complex, substantial malt-influenced flavour. It had been many years since Luc had brewed one but he rolled up his sleeves and James and him combined elements from both of their brewing backgrounds that we look forward to sharing with you on the day of the festival.