Yokohama Beer Brewery

Yokohama Beer started brewing in 1999 and is the local beer company with the longest history in Yokohama City. The representative, Hisashi Ota, was originally a restaurant manager, and after taking over a business that had stalled, he restarted it around local craft beer and local ingredients.

Ota's turning point was the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Together with his peers, he started a local-production, local-consumption effort to "consume what is produced in our own town within the town itself," and that became the foundation of today's Yokohama Beer. They brew beers using wheat from farmers in Seya Ward, and the restaurant menu features photos of the producers and their thoughts.

The lineup is wide too. The standards include Yokohama Lager, Weizen, Pale Ale, and Hama Kuro, a session black IPA. Their recent new release is even more ambitious: "YOKOHAMA SESSION IPA" is a refreshing canned beer made with New Zealand hops, released on April 1.

The limited THE MARBLING series' "Bashamichi Coffee Milk Stout" is amazing. It's a coffee milk stout aged eight months in bourbon barrels, using decaffeinated coffee from Colombia. And "Yokohama Saison" uses Krush, a noteworthy new hop variety.

It has real credentials too, winning three categories at the Japan Great Beer Awards 2026. They've also been actively collaborating with local companies, including a collaboration beer with Kiyoken. In 2025, they launched the Yokohama Craft Beer Association and started an initiative to bring together more than 10 breweries in the city.

Their flagship restaurant, UMAYA, is in Kannai, and because it is attached to the brewery, you can drink beer fresh from the source. Ota's catchphrase is, "Through myself, I convey the producers' thoughts to the customer." There's a real weight to having supported Yokohama's beer culture for more than 25 years.