Catching up with friends - Crazy on Collabs

As you might have noticed of late, we’ve been on a tear with collaborations for the past few months.

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Brewed Collabs to Date in 2024

[in chronoligical order]

Mar

• DD4D (Ehime Prefecture)
  • KBC side = Kawaru Gawaru (Sour IPA)

• DD4D side = Kawaru Gawaru (Dry Hopped Citrus Belgian Tripel)

April

• West Coast Brewing (Shizuoka Prefecture)
  • KBC side = Golden Ratio
    • Citra Edition (Hazy IPA)

• El Dorado Edition (Hazy IPA)

• WCB side (2023) = Rikuryoku Kyoushin (Hazy IPA)

May

• KOBO Brewery (Toyama Prefecture) + Godspeed Brewery (Toronto, Canada)
  • Mokumoku Jin (Grodziskie)

Jul

• Y. Market (Aichi Prefecture)
  • KBC side = Egotistic Dilemma (DDH Double IPA)

Aug

• Zakkoku Koubou (Saitama Prefecture)
  • KBC side = 
    • Orthodoxy (Hefeweizen)

• Heresy (Matcha Weizen)

Sep

• Two Rabbits (Shiga Prefecture)
  • KBC side = Movember (Baltic Porter)

• 2R side = Movember (Sahti)

Oct

• Totopia (Aichi Prefecture)
• KBC side = Lactophia (Hazy IPA w/ Wild Strawberry)

• Totopia side = soon to be released

From March, we've been releasing a collab at a pace of about 1 per month.

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Crazily, in November, we are going to be releasing 3 collabs:

November

• Be Easy Brewing (Aomori Prefecture) + Black Tide Brewing (Miyagi Prefecture) + Sakamichi Brewing (Tachikawa, Tokyo) + West Coast Brewing (Shizuoka) -「Momonofu」

• Minoh Brewing (Osaka Prefecture) -「Koen Kyoudai」

• Nara Brewing Co (Nara Prefecture) -「Tale of Two Cities」

This has been extremely striking as KBC collaborations for the past few years (essentially post-Corona) have been far and few between.

Collaborations represent a chance for us to get out of our comfort zone and brew something special. It might be that the style is different than what you normally might find from us; it might be that there are some ingredients in there that we don’t normally use or are difficult to source or are just quite expensive and need to be reserved for special occasions. Or lastly, rules of thumb or methods to making our beer are put to the side and we embrace our counterpart’s method of doing something and make that a learning point to put into our future arsenal towards making a wider variety of beers and/or better quality beers.

Collaborations also represent both a simple and great chance to catch up with our compatriots in the industry.

Furthermore, with James having joined us early this year and having moved 1/2 way across the world, we thought there would be no better way to introduce him to the industry than to go on a “pilgrimage of collabs” of sorts.

With the context of this set against the backdrop of blowing up 50% of our beer program (ie. KBC2.0) and our 10th anniversary in May 2025 (our first beers were poured for people on May 9th, 2015), we decided to become even more foolish, throw 2 sheets to the wind, and actually doubled down on the pilgrimage.

However, instead of simply upping the number of collabs, we decided to split our collabs into 2 purposes:

• Purpose1: catching up with old friends (places we have collab’ed with before) + new friends alike (ie. not yet collab’ed with) [Note: this is referred to below as "compatriot"]

• Purpose2: catching up with old colleagues (breweries where the owner and/or brewer used to work on our brew team) [Note: this is referred to below as "OB"]

With that in mind, here is our future timeline for collabs leading up to May 2025.

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Soon-to-be Released Collabs in 2024

[in chronoligical order]

1.「Momonofu」(compatriot)

• Involved Breweries:Be Easy Brewing + Black Tide Brewing + Sakamichi Brewing + West Coast Brewing
  • Background:
    • As was mentioned in a separate post, our chance encounter with Freestyle happened when we were visiting WCB last year and took a look into their raw material fridge and came across these beautiful silver boxes
    • At the behest of WCB, we found ourselves on a plane bound for New Zealand to check out just how good the hops were
    • Unfortunately, Lady Luck wasn't on Be Easy's side as they were snowed in and so for 2024, 4 breweries went together
    • In June, 4 breweries + Be Easy all got together under one roof when all the varying 2024 crop year lot samples were shipped our way to judge and choose

• Premise:
  • For the breweries that went down South and contracted Freestyle directly, the idea was to brew a beer together around a unifying ingredient - cue Peacharine hops
  • We originally brewed with some crop year 2023 Peacharine we sourced from Be Easy. We used Peacharine in our KBC2.0 Donburako Lager and Hazy IPA beers. It was our first time using Freestyle hops (Peacharine no less) and while we thought the beers were okay we were excited to have another go at Peacharine and iterate on what we learned
  • This was luckily the first year that they made Peacharine available on a wider scale and so all Freestyle contracting breweries could get access to it
  • For the other parts of the beer - whether it be beer style, adjunct, supporting hop - the idea was to do a roulette based game where we had to make a beer based upon our luck in spinning





• Some breweries made off light (we're looking at you Black Tide). Other breweries had quite a challenge before them
• In KBC’s case, we drew: “Pale Ale”, “Lactose” and “Waimea” --- sigh
• All 5 participating breweries will be shipping their beers around the country during the same week (week of Nov 18th) so that people can try to sample as many of them as possible (hopefully - the lucky/brave ones will even be able to do it side-by-side-by-side-by-side-by-side)

2.「Koen Kyoudai」(compatriot)

• Involved Breweries: Minoh Brewing

• Background:
  • When we were getting the brewery off the ground back in the day, Ben and I (Paul) used to live in Shimo-Kitazawa, Tokyo
  • In that neighbourhood, there happened to be 2 famous (infamous?) bars: Ushitora I and Ushitora II that we would frequent (dare I say too much?)
  • While planning to get KBC off the ground, one evening we entered the bar and Kaori-san, one of the 3 sisters who founded Minoh, happened to be there
  • We introduced ourselves as the guys who were going to start a brewery in Kyoto and she kindly told us that she was cheering us on as the number of breweries in Kansai (especially at the time) were few and she appreciated more people trying to setup in the region
  • Since then, we have gone to her for help on several occasions and she’s helped us out of a few binds (introducing us her alcohol bureau accountant/consultant; introducing us to Macchan [below]; introducing us to Seijo Ishii, our first supermarket account; the list goes on and on)
• Premise:
  • With the collab, Kaori told us that since we first did peach collab with them a few years back, they’ve now expanded and use 4 different peaches depending upon the time of year

• For a long time, James has been wanting to make a kolsh and Kaori-san also immediately liked the idea because they’ve never used peach to make a kolsh beer before
• This beer will be ready for sale at the end of the month

3. 「Tale of Two Cities」(OB)

• Involved Breweries:Nara Brewing Company

• Background:
  • Yasu hails from Nara and for the longest time, had a dream of setting up his own brewery in Nara
  • Knowing this, he worked at KBC to get to grips with brewing at a commercial scale and also experiencing what it was like getting a brewery off the ground during the early days



• Their brewery is located about 15mins by car South of Nara station
• NBC has made a conscious effort to somewhat eschews IPAs and over the past several years has put a lot of focus on making a variety of beers featuring lots of different adjuncts

• Premise:
  • With that in mind, for the longest time, we wanted to revisit the beer he once made on a small batch scale back in the day - a milk stout
  • On Yasu’s side, thinking of the milk stout theme, he opted to brew a golden/white stout
  • To strengthen the connection, we introduced Yasu to our most recent coffee collaborator: Coyote
  • On their side, they introduced us to Any B&B+Coffee
  • The beers were then spiked with an additional variety of adjuncts to imbibe both sides of the collab with some further unifying ingredients
  • This beer will be on sale towards the end of the month

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Remaining Collabs in 2024

[in chronoligical order]

Yamorido (OB)

• Premise:
  • Hiroko Iezumi, the head brewer, used to work for KBC a few years back. A native to Kyoto, before working at KBC, she was working at Yoho Brewing.

• Yamorido brewery is located in a beautiful area of Fushimi, Kyoto and the brewery build-out happened in a traditional Machiya building
• It was once a tea selling business and they’ve kept that tradition alive by still selling tea in their shop + making beers with a variety of different teas
• James has wanted to brew a tea beer for a long time and so we decided to brew something apt for winter
• On Hiroko’s side, she loves NZ hops (especially Motueka and Riwaka) and so we’ll be taking a box or two of some fresh NZ hops over and brew a big and burly IPA over there

Ape Brewing (OB series)

• Premise:
• Katoh Daikichi-san opened up Yellow Ape Craft back in 2012 and has been serving both domestic and imported craft beer ever since
• With that success, he opened up Smoke Ape (focusing on smoked food - unfortunately now closed) and Koumin (focusing on Japanese food + domestic beers)
• He made a decision to start his own brewery and made the decision to convert Koumin to Ape Brewing and asked Yuushi Matsumoto (nickname: Matchan) to be their head brewer