CARVAAN Brewery

CARVAAN is a brewery built on a sheer cliff above Hanno Riverbank. It overlooks the Iruma River, and the building blends a Meiji-era Western mansion with Arabian architecture. Inside, there are Ottoman palace lamps and Egyptian royal furnishings, so it feels like a completely different world.

What’s more, its parent company is a trading firm. The president had originally traveled the world doing salt trading, and the company was already operating Mediterranean and Arabian restaurants in Tokyo and Yokohama before adding its own brewery. CARVAAN is Persian for “caravan,” meaning a caravan or trading convoy.

This is the impressive part: their "Arabian Lime Ale" is a golden ale made with lime peel from Alexandria, Egypt. Their "Andes Cacao Stout" is a dark beer made with cacao nibs from Colombia. Their "Belgian White" combines coriander from Egypt with yuzu peel from Hanno.

They import malt directly from Belgium’s oldest malting company, and they source hops from Europe too. Since they’re a trading company, they have the distribution channels. The brewmaster, Ei Kimura, is the kind of person whose driving curiosity is to try making everything from scratch, and his approach is to recreate, in CARVAAN’s own style, beers that were never trend-chasers but still left their mark on beer history.

They have their own farm in Nanko, Hanno City, where they grow 12 kinds of hops without pesticides. The "Hanno Fresh Hop IPA," brewed only with hops harvested there, is a once-a-year limited release. They also make "Spelt Weizen," which uses the ancient grain spelt, so the lineup is unique even at the ingredient level.

The terrace is pet-friendly, and they also accommodate halal-certified ingredients. They’ve steadily collected awards in competitions in Japan and abroad, and apparently even their bottle design was recognized in an Australian competition. They also have a gin distillery on site and have expanded to an annual production scale of 210,000 liters, so they’re really gaining momentum.