Otaki Beer

Have you heard of Otaki Beer? It's a small brewery in Otaki Town, deep in the Boso Peninsula in Chiba.

It's an area with satoyama countryside spreading out all around, where the water is so clear that fireflies can live. And the brewery director, Shigeru Miyazaki, is quite an interesting person. He originally ran an apparel company in Tokyo.

Exactly. When he was thinking, 'I want to do work I can continue with passion for the rest of my life,' the owner of the beer restaurant he used to visit in Ikebukuro invited him to start a brewery in Otaki. From there, he trained at breweries in Tochigi and Iwate, and opened the brewery in 2022.

The brewery itself is great too. They renovated a former farm barn, with the brewery on the first floor and a beer bar on the second. And the brewing water comes from underground water in the satoyama. While many breweries use tap water, they spent half a year on testing to make brewing with groundwater possible.

The regular lineup is built around three beers: OTAKI Golden Ale, OTAKI IPA, and OTAKI Stout. The IPA has a grassy aroma with citrusy hops, and the stout has notes of coffee and dark chocolate. They also turn the spent malt from brewing into compost with nearby farmers, or use it as chicken feed.

Miyazaki says he wants to help the Isumi region, and he even shows up for town gatherings. He also has a sense of style that comes from his apparel background, so I think it's pretty close to the ideal form of a brewery rooted in the local community.