Update on Rediscovery Series

As of May this year, we will have been around for 10 years as a brewery. This is plenty of time to gain a reputation and an image, and from fairly early on we have been labelled by many as the “Belgian brewery” within the Japan market. People know that isn’t all we do, and they know we aren’t traditional, either, with our 3 core beers all playing around with Belgian yeast and their interaction with hops, but it is still the first thing that many people say when asked about Kyoto Brewing.

Excluding all the many series we do away from the Belgian space, we have also been keen to avoid becoming a one trick pony in terms of just mixing different hops with Belgian yeast. Belgium’s rich beer culture is hugely varied in terms of strength of beer, in terms of the character from the yeast, but also in terms of its openness and freedom afforded by its use of adjuncts. While Germany is strictly defined by its “Reinheitsgebot”, its “purity law”, defining what is acceptable to use in beer production (malt, hops, water and yeast) and what is not (i.e. everything else), Belgium is free, and its sheer variety is a testament what centuries of boundary pushing can create.

And so it would be a waste if all our Belgian beers weren’t to take advantage of such freedoms. While there is so much to be learned from replicating or building on tradition, there is also so much that can be played around with outside of the 4 basic items that go in beer. And Japan has so much to offer in terms of potential ingredients.

We created our “Rediscovery” series a couple of years back, with the idea of going back to Belgium with fresh eyes after our years of journeying as a brewery. The idea was to go back to where we came from, where we were influenced by, and go back to something more traditional and, to quote ourselves, “put a twist on them through interpreting them through who we are now”. That latter element really ended up taking a bigger part than we had imagined, with the series eventually morphing into a pilgrimage for us into both how to master these classic styles again, as well as to find the very best twist with a domestically created ingredient that could potentially take what was already almost perfect to another level. Not that we necessarily believe we will make something better than what the past hundreds of years have already honed, but we could potentially do something that could stand up to it, and in its own unique way that simply couldn’t be replicated back in the homeland.

This series has evolved and developed, just as we have, and so we are giving a new look to the series. While some of the releases going forward will be relatively close to their previous incarnations, the first of the new style labels is a new saison for us, going back to basics in terms of the fundamental concept of the style: a farmhouse ale using a variety of different grains. For this version, we are using some “soba” buckwheat, as well as some domestically produced raw wheat, to make it as close to the authentic original might have been as possible, albeit with Japanese grains.

We hope you like what this series has to offer as much as we do! While not the loudest beers on the planet, we hope they are as multi-layered as the beers they were inspired by. As all these beers are fermented within package, as is traditional, they qualify as “happoshu” according to Japanese beer regulations (hopefully someday the Japanese tax office will recognize traditional Belgian beer as “beer” as well!). As a result, they will evolve and change with time, and so you may enjoy trying to age them for a while in the fridge or at low (wine cellar) temperature.