Blade Factory Brewing

Blade Factory Brewing is a nano brewery that only opened in July 2024, and its setup is straight out of a manga. The brewery is inside a working cutlery factory in Seki, Gifu Prefecture.

The representative, Kaori Rodriguez, spent 15 years working in temporary staffing in Osaka. But after falling hard for craft beer, she had long wanted to open her own brewery. Her husband, Joe Rodriguez, is American and a cutlery artisan who trained in Japanese knife forging in Sakai. They moved to Seki because of his job transfer.

Seki City is one of the world's three great cutlery production centers, alongside Solingen in Germany and Sheffield in the UK. Because they turned a corner of the cutlery factory where Joe works into a brewery, knife makers are still sharpening blades right next door. And before opening, Kaori trained at Kamado Brewery and at Two Rabbits Brewing in Shiga.

That is pure genius. "KASUMIBA" is a hazy pale ale, "GYUTO IPA" is a West Coast IPA dry-hopped with Galaxy and Strata, "YANAGIBA LAGER" is a lager, and "ARATOGI" is an American amber. They are puns connecting types of blades with beer styles. KASUMIBA uses the word for haze, while GYUTO is a powerful, punchy IPA, like a gyuto knife.

Their newest releases are bold too. "DANKY DAGGER XPA" is an XPA made with Riwaka Diesel, a new hop from New Zealand. "MOROHA" is a double IPA with Idaho 7 and Motueka at 7.3% ABV. Their first-anniversary beer, "ICCHOU," is a DDH hazy IPA with Krush, Galaxy, and Citra, and it was so popular that fans asked for it to come back.

Their Untappd rating is a very high 3.91. It is a small 500-liter brew, and they are only open on weekends, but from the counter seats you can see the brewing equipment through glass, and from the neighboring factory you can hear the sound of blades being sharpened. They also released a new smoked lager called "SMOKE FORGED LAGER," and using "forged" in the beer name really fits the cutlery-factory setting.