Update on Kimagure Series

Our Kimagure series is our oldest limited release series. While most of our limited releases were in the early days off-the-cuff and ad-hoc, looking at what we could create with the free tank we had available, the Kimagure series beers had a more clear concept behind them.

While to many people, to this day, we are seen as a “Belgian brewery”, the truth is that we have always been a diverse brewery, not just in the makeup of our company’s members’ nationalities, but in the types of beers we make. It’s true that our year-round beers are all based upon a Belgian house yeast strain, but the other elements of them have always been varied, using hops from America, other European nations, and New Zealand.

Our Kimagure series is also not Belgian at all! While Belgium was one of our major influences, the other biggest one at the beginning was the American craft beer scene that really led to the current beer revolution that we see echoing over all corners of the globe. In our first year, aside from core beers, everything else was simply “limited release” with the exception of Kimagure.

Why was Kimagure given special treatment? Well, the concept seemed too good not to become a key series unto itself. Seasonality is hugely important in Japan, and especially in cuisine. For this reason, the whole idea of Kimagure was created, with the idea that a chef makes a spontaneous decision what to make on a given day, as a kind of “chef’s daily recommendation”, but the emphasis is typically based around the element of seasonality of ingredients, and what he might have found that was good in the market that day. From there, the idea is that he gets creative, making something that takes advantage and showcases these wonderful ingredients.

We wanted to take that idea and bring it into the beer world. Here is a series where each entry takes a look at our ingredients – malts and hops – and thinks what will work well in the given season we are in.

The seasons are pretty consistent in Japan. Winter will be cold, Summer will be blistering, and the seasons in between will be gorgeous. As a result, we settled on the styles.

・Spring: a classic clean West Coast IPA with a solid malt backbone to stand up to the chill remaining in the air, and some hop bite to match up to that as well.

・Summer: a session IPA for maximum refreshment, staying light on bitterness but heavy on aroma, and a low enough ABV to allow you to keep drinking without getting dehydrated!

・Autumn: a Red IPA, going back to the maltier side as the temperature drops, giving some extra hop bite again, and looking to a redder hue to fit the colour of the season!

・Winter: a White IPA with a good amount of wheat, and a solid amount of hops, leaning more on the citrusy side, with citrus fruit being heavily associated with this season here.

While the concepts of the beers are the same, we’ve never made the same recipe twice, and it keeps evolving along with the tastes and creativity of the brewer and the development of new hop varieties.

Perhaps this is why this series has been such a success for us, and remains by far our most widely distributed limited release series.

With our having a refresh of our lineup, partly due to the shift in our hop direction, and partly because of the arrival of our head brewer James, we have also been tweaking our Kimagure beers. We have taken advantage of James’ knowledge, adding onto the base we already had from before with the implementation of new techniques for getting the most out of hop character, and also making full use of the range of hops we are bringing in from more places than ever.

We are revamping the design to fit in with this as well. As with the direction of the beers, it is more of an evolution than a revolution, but we hope that you think, as we do, that it represents the essence of this series well.