Eight Peaks Brewing

Yuma Saito of Eight Peaks Brewing was born in 1989, and his family has run a gentian flower farm for four generations.

It does connect. At first, Saito thought the family business was meaningless, so he moved to Tokyo and took a research position at Tsumura, a major kampo medicine company. There he learned that gentian is used as a raw ingredient in herbal medicine, and that changed how he saw the family business. Then, after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, when he returned home and thought about the future of agriculture, he encountered hops.

Exactly. He realized that "hops are flowers. Beer is a secondary product of flowers." So he went to Germany to train, and since he had no money, he earned cash by working valet parking at a hotel. At a German beer garden, when he asked a local which beer they recommended, the answer was, "The beer from this town, of course" - and that became his starting point.

He didn’t open a brewery right away. Instead, he trained for three and a half years as a kurabito at a local sake brewery. After learning sake fermentation techniques, he launched the brewery in 2018 at the foot of the Yatsugatake mountains, at an elevation of 1,200 meters. It’s an extremely small operation, with one batch at 200 liters, monthly production of about 2 kiloliters, and just three employees.

They’re all from the local Suwa dialect. "Yaiyai" means "Hey!" "Meta" means "very," and "Achiira" means "It’s hot." The flagship "Yaiyai" is a pale ale with bright citrus hops, while "Meta," made with 50% wheat, has a fruity banana-like character. And "Kokoiira Ale" is brewed with 100% Shinshu Wase hops grown at the foot of the Yatsugatake mountains, giving it a peach-like stone fruit aroma.

You know your stuff. It’s designed with a stronger malt character so it can be enjoyed slowly in front of a campfire. And they also opened their first direct-run draft beer shop on the first floor of Bellvia, directly connected to Chino Station. They’re running a crowdfunding campaign too, hoping to make it a community hub.