Paradise Beer Factory

Paradise Beer Factory is on a whole different level from the rest. They're brewing the world's only beer made with 100% naturally cultivated malt.

Normally, breweries buy in malt and brew with it, but here they grow their own barley without using any pesticides, fertilizers, compost, or herbicides, turn it into malt, and make beer from it. From the field to a glass of beer, they do it all themselves. It's like a wine estate, or "domaine."

That's right. The representative, Hideto Karasawa, is from Shizuoka and graduated from Meiji University's Faculty of Agriculture. He spent nine years at an agricultural corporation in Koga City, where he guided contract farmers and developed products, but after meeting naturally cultivated farmers, he moved to Kashima and went independent.

And the location is amazing too. It's just a 30-second walk from the Great Torii gate of Kashima Shrine. They use sacred water from Kashima Shrine for brewing. They also naturally cultivate about 70 kinds of vegetables, and the foundation is a crop-rotation system of "cultivating with barley and fertilizing with soybeans."

Their flagship is "Saison / Yasaka Paradise." It's a saison-style beer made with 100% naturally cultivated malt, and just two years after they started brewing, it won silver at the 2018 International Beer Cup, one of the world's five major beer competitions.

They also now run the "KashiPara Full Experience Tour," which takes you from the farm to the brewery in two hours. It seems to sell out immediately every time. Karasawa's daily life, spending daytime in the fields and evenings at the brewery-restaurant, feels like a work of art.