Valley of the Wind Beer

Valley of the Wind Beer. This is a place you could call the birthplace of Japan's organic beer. In 2000, it became the first Japanese beer maker to obtain JAS organic certification.

The brewery is in the Tanna Basin of Kannami Town. It's a 250-meter-high basin with no traffic lights. It's a land with more than 140 years of dairy farming history, home to 10 dairy farmers and about 1,000 dairy cows.

The brewery is inside a farm-themed park called "Oratche, the Dairy Kingdom." It also has a cheese workshop, an ice cream workshop, and an animal petting ranch. The brewing water is natural water from the Fuji-Hakone mountain range, drawn from a 300-meter-deep well on the property.

There's a pale ale called "Izu Ale," and it's special. They use two-row barley from Izu, "Mikamo Golden," contract-grown by local farmers, and malt it themselves. The hops are Kent Golding from the UK. A brewery that practices such complete local production for ingredients, starting with the barley, is extremely rare.

And the story you absolutely can't leave out is the connection to Ghibli. "Valley of the Wind Beer" is sold as a limited item at the cafe "Mugiwara Boshi" in the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka.

Actually, it wasn't named after Nausicaa; the name naturally came from the concept of local production for local consumption. That coincidence led to its connection with Ghibli. The label illustration is an original drawing by Goro Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki's son, based on his actual visit to the Tanna Basin.