Bifuka Shirakaba Brewery

Bifuka Shirakaba Brewery is seriously wild. They brew beer using 100% birch sap instead of brewing water.

It’s almost unheard of worldwide. And birch sap is an ultra-rare ingredient that can only be collected for about two weeks during snowmelt, with just about 5 liters a day from a single trunk. Using all of that in beer is incredibly lavish.

It is. The real race is about one month, from mid-April to early May. The brewery was founded by a man named Katsuhisa Takahashi, who originally worked at a major Tokyo IT company. In 2017, he visited Bifuka on a motorcycle trip and was captivated after hearing a pension owner’s idea for birch sap beer.

He started out with a German brewer named Marius, but that person later left. From there, Takahashi himself apprenticed for a year under a craft beer brewer in Sapporo and relearned beer making from scratch.

The flagship is an IPA called "WHITE LINES," at 6.0%. They also make a hoppy cream ale called "Wild Sheep Chase," at 5.5%. The names are great too. The brewery is in a building renovated from a 90-year-old red brick warehouse, and at the attached restaurant BSB you can drink draft beer with local Genghis Khan-style grilled lamb.

It’s a small town of about 4,000 people between Asahikawa and Wakkanai, and in winter it drops below minus 20 degrees Celsius. It’s the northernmost craft beer brewery in Japan. Beer born from birch sap in an extreme cold region is enough of a story to make you want another drink, right?