「Mazu wa Biiru」

“Toriaezu Biiru” is a phrase often heard in izakayas and restaurants across the country. “A beer for now” is what it literally translates as, but contained within it are a number of implications. A more positive one is to say that “I want to get my order in and my first drink quickly”, but the inference is also that “I don’t want to think about what I want now, so I’ll start with a beer and then look to something more considered next”. There is no specificity of what beer contained within it, and it is interchanged with “toriaezu nama”, or “whatever you have on draft for now”.

We decided to turn this phrase on its head, and came up with the phrase “Mazu wa Biiru”, roughly translating as “Everything Starts With the Beer”, or “Beer First”. This phrase symbolises our unwavering commitment to quality, that we will prioritise our beer above all else and continuously look to brew consistently delicious beer.

Guided by this principle, we have steadfastly continued brewing beer that we believe to be delicious, unwaveringly and sincerely, and making sure that we look at what we want to make first before looking at costs. This is a guiding principle for us, and one that we intend to never change.

Our Beer

Exploration and Craftsmanship make up 2 of our 4 core values, and are the cornerstone of our principles surrounding beer production, and the combination of which more broadly symbolise what we believe is the difference between craft and mass produced beer.

We often used to say “Brew the Beers You Want to Drink”, a phrase that a friend and mentor of ours in this great industry said to us. For us, while there are lots of great drinks out there, we believe that beer has the greatest variety of all. Beer can be dark or light, sour or bitter, sweet or dry, strong and boozy for a cold dark night, or low in ABV and perfect for daytime drinking in the sun. It can be fruity, spicy, or herbal. Name a flavour, and there is probably a beer that is close to it.

And yet for many people, beer means one kind of light coloured drink. We love the variety that beer offers, and exploring this has been a passion of ours from the beginning.

We are also passionate about sharing it. It saddens us that many wonderful restaurants, where immense care in the sourcing of ingredients is taken, and where wines or sakes are carefully selected, choose one variety of mass produced beer to put on their menus. Why? Just as certain wines suit certain foods, so do beers. And with beer being so varied, we wish to change this culture.

And so we continue to make the beers we love, challenge new beers we are excited about, and endeavoring to make our beers better and better.

We make balanced but complex beers using our house yeast that are wonderful for enjoying with a wide range of food. We make high impact American-style IPAs, using some of the latest techniques in the industry, and with hops personally selected from farmers and traders at the source. We make fruited sours with immense amounts of wonderful fruit, and lagers inspired by the classic styles, as well as more modern and impactful hoppier renditions. We put beer through refermentation those that we believe will benefit and evolve with time, and look to package with maximum freshness those that taste perfect right away.

Craft beer is very different from 10 years ago. 10 years ago it was very different from 20. It is constantly changing, and doing so fast. This is something we believe should be embraced rather than resisted, and so we live with continual change and evolution within our DNA.

「Creating a Positive Impact Through Making Beer the Right Way」 

When people create or make actions, regardless of scale or scope, those actions inevitably create an impact. In our brewing, we strive to minimise our negative environmental impact, while endeavoring to maximise positive potential impact on our community.

Beer brewing inherently generates significant waste as a negative byproduct. The vast majority of this waste is in the form of grain, roughly 400-900kg of which is used in each batch of Kyoto Brewing’s beer. This becomes even heavier after it has picked up all the moisture in the mash. We are proud to have never once thrown away any of our spent grain since founding our company. Every bit has been reused as either fertiliser or animal feed.

Another environmental choice was that we made a decision to switch to cans at a point where the industry said that they looked “cheap”, and that customers want and expect bottles for high-end products. Cans are lighter in weight, creating less CO2 in transportation, and also require less energy in recycling.   

We also don’t believe that good tasting beer should be off the back of workers’ sacrifice. As a result, we have made the decision, as a work environment, to eschew industry conditions such as limited holidays and excessive overtime, ensuring workers get their 2 days off per week, sick leave, and more holidays than standard. While beer is low in margin, we don’t believe it is impossible to offer employees the right benefits whilst avoiding compromising on our beer.

There are plenty of more things we can do as a brewery, as an employer, from the point of view of lowering our environmental impact, and from the perspective of contributing to and supporting our local community. We’ll continue to endeavor to get better, with creating a positive impact and lowering negative impacts firmly in our minds.