Quartet Brewing

Quartet Brewing is a brewery that's just turned five. What's impressive is that it's won at the JGBA (Japan Great Beer Awards) for five consecutive years.

Exactly. Brillante Hazy IPA and Resonance Sweet won silver. The owner-brewer is a guy named Sho Shiina, and the trigger was that he got hooked on craft beer during a factory tour at Samuel Adams in Boston while studying in the U.S.

Not right away. After that, he kept touring breweries in Europe and the U.S. once or twice a year, and started going to events around 2012. Then, after deciding he wanted to make beer for real, he went to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to study. It's a city with one of the highest numbers of breweries in the U.S., so he studied in the university's brewing program for a year and trained at local breweries too.

He apparently had been living between Tokyo and Karuizawa, and what clinched it was "the abundance of nature and the comfortable feeling of a place where people from all kinds of backgrounds gather." He returned to Japan in 2020 because of COVID, kept taking online classes while preparing, and opened along Karuizawa Hon-dori in March 2021.

It means a quartet in the sense that the four major ingredients of beer - malt, hops, yeast, and water - resonate with one another to create a beautiful harmony. That's why the beer names also use musical terms as motifs, like Waltzer Brown Ale and Nocturnal Stout.

Waltzer uses five kinds of malt, and it's a brown ale where sweetness and roasty aroma overlap like waves. Quartet IPA hits you with citrus and pineapple aromas, while Brillante Hazy IPA lives up to its name with a "brilliant" juiciness. They have 10 taps, so if you go, you're sure to find a pour you'll love.