Gujo Hachiman Beer Kobokobo

Gujo Hachiman Beer Kobokobo has incredible location power. The brewery is in the basement of a machiya called Genrin, a town house that once belonged to a Kampo medicine doctor from the Edo to Meiji periods.

Exactly. The owner, Tetsuya Matsumoto, used to work for a company in Okayama, but he was a serious homebrewer who had been making beer at home for more than 20 years. As he started serving his own beer at company events, he decided to go independent and moved to Gujo Hachiman in 2012.

Water. Matsumoto visited candidate locations all over Japan to test the water quality, and he fell in love with the spring water in Gujo Hachiman, filtered through limestone over 200 million years. It comes from the spring at Inukai Shrine, with slightly high hardness and a subtle sweetness. They say this water creates a clean, crisp finish like a lager.

The brewing setup is unusual too. In the basement they have five 17-liter Uni kegs, for a total of just 85 liters, so it’s ultra-nano scale. Even so, they are always brewing 13 to 15 different varieties at once. Being small makes it possible to offer so many styles.

They make cream ale, bitter ale, IPA, porter, and even a Belgian duppel aged for six months. At the Japan Great Beer Awards, their pale ale won gold in 2020, and their porter won silver in the dark ale category in 2024. Their session IPA and brown ale have also won awards.

You can drink beer while looking out over the courtyard from a pure Japanese-style tatami room. It’s beer on the engawa. The name “Kobokobo” apparently means handmade beer packed with yeast. I’ve heard the owner’s wife is also planning to make naturally leavened bread.