Hongo Kikuzakamachi Kamosu

There’s a brewery called Hongo Kikuzakamachi Kamosu just a 2-minute walk from Hongo-sanchome Station, right near the University of Tokyo’s Akamon Gate. Its owner, Sam, is an interesting guy. He used to be a sales rep for a chemical manufacturer and lived in Germany for five years.

Exactly. In Germany, it’s normal to swing by a neighborhood brewery with empty bottles and come home with them filled. Sam wanted to do that in Tokyo. Just before turning 50, he quit his corporate job, trained for two months at BREW CLASSIC in Kanazawa, and opened in his hometown of Bunkyo Ward in June 2023.

Sam has a line I love: he wants to be like the neighborhood tofu shop. One every few blocks, where you can stop by and take home something freshly made. Beer should be like that too. There’s also a German saying, "Beer tastes best in the shadow of the brewery chimney," and he’s putting that idea into practice.

There are five regular beers, and the neat part is that all of them are named after the history of this area. There’s a pale ale called "Kanyasu Kara wa Mugi," a twist on the famous Edo-period senryu "Even Hongo is within Edo as far as Kanyasu." "Kikuzaka Fry Day," named after Kikuzaka, is an IPA, and the dark beer "Bungo Paradise" is an homage to the literary district where Higuchi Ichiyo and Natsume Soseki once lived.

She lived on Kikuzaka from 1890. She supported her family by doing sewing and laundry work while writing, and the well she used still remains in the back alleys. "Bungo Paradise" is a stout carrying the memory of that place. And then there’s "Hongo Pub Rock," a bitter ale whose name riffs on Hongo.

Sam says the key is figuring out how to get the yeast to work during fermentation, so he especially cares about yeast management and sanitation. The logo is also based on an electron micrograph of yeast cell division. His training ground, BREW CLASSIC, won gold at the 2023 World Beer Cup, so the technical lineage is solid too.