Kizakura

Kizakura's Fushimizu Brewery is the craft beer production base run by a long-established Kyoto Fushimi sake brewery founded in 1925. They started brewing beer in 1995, making it Kyoto's first and the seventh craft brewery in Japan.

They repurposed 100 years of refined fermentation techniques, yeast management, and water chemistry for a new kind of sake. What’s especially remarkable is a beer called Kura no Kaori, brewed with Kizakura’s own yeast used for ginjo sake fermentation. It has a gentle ginjo aroma even though it’s beer, a glass that only a sake brewery could make. It has won silver several times at the International Beer Awards in Australia.

'Yamadanishiki' uses Yamada Nishiki, the king of sake rice, and has a creamy profile with a hint of sake. Another intriguing line is the 'Nile Story' series. Professor Sakuji Yoshimura, an Egyptology archaeologist at Waseda University, deciphered the brewing method of ancient Egyptian beer, and Kyoto University had preserved emmer wheat collected in Ethiopia 50 years ago. Kizakura stepped up to make beer with that legendary ancient wheat.

Exactly. White Nile is the beer made with that emmer wheat. Major beer companies turned it down because the production volume was too small, but Kizakura took it on. It was a university collaboration that even used ultrasound to measure stomach capacity and derive an optimal barley-to-wheat ratio of 8:2.

Fushimi's groundwater, Fushimizu, is a medium-hard water selected as one of Japan's Top 100 Famous Waters, with a well-balanced mix of potassium and calcium. It's the source of the mellow character of Fushimi sake, which is called 'women's sake,' and that same softness comes through in the beer. Kizakura also follows the philosophy that 'cloudiness is umami,' so it intentionally uses a gentle filtration process that leaves yeast in the beer.

And it's free. At five stories, it's the only place in Japan where you can see both a sake koji room and craft beer brewing tanks. There's a restaurant and shop on the first floor, where you can drink Kyoto Beer Kolsch, Alt, and even matcha IPA. The Kolsch won gold at the 2019 Japan Great Beer Awards.