Kiuchi Brewery

Kiuchi Brewery's "Ishioka Brewery" is a separate site from the Nukada Brewery we talked about earlier. It's in Ishioka City, and it plays another interesting role.

The Ishioka Brewery added its own malting facility in 2023. It's a base for making malt in-house for beer and whiskey. It has both a drum-style system that can process 5 tons of grain at once and a traditional 500 kg floor malting setup.

It's a traditional malting method where grain is spread on the floor and turned by hand as it germinates. It's famous at Scotch whisky distilleries. Hardly anyone in Japan does this. That means they can now cover about 500 tons of malt per year themselves.

And there's also the Yaso Distillery on site, where they make "Hinomaru Whisky." They're using domestically grown barley called "Kaneko Golden," cultivated on abandoned farmland in Ibaraki, trying to bring the taste of the land into the whisky. The recently released "Signature 1823 SMALL BATCH LIMITED" is also a commemorative limited edition for an award.

Exactly. They've been working on this since 2009, solving local agricultural issues while securing their own raw materials. They're probably the only brewery in Japan that malts ingredients for beer, sake, and whisky all in one place.

Kiuchi Brewery also runs a dedicated bus tour called "BAR BUS HITACHINO," which lets you visit their beer, sake, and whisky breweries. You might be able to see the malting facility at the Ishioka Brewery too, so it's worth checking out.