Talmary

Have you heard of Talmary? It's in Chizu Town, Tottori, and it's a very unusual brewery for Japan because a bakery is brewing beer there.

The representative, Itaru Watanabe, was originally a baker. While baking bread with natural yeast, he intuited that yeast made from grain would be better suited to bread, and that led him to start brewing beer. In the primary fermentation of beer, the lees that collect at the bottom of the tank are normally discarded, but they are actually a mass of yeast. He uses that as bread starter.

What's more, they don't use any commercial yeast at all. It's the only brewery in Japan that brews with wild yeast floating in the air alone. They culture and use microbes found on raisin skins, kiwifruit, and figs.

That's why maturation takes an enormous amount of time. "Aged Saison" takes 1 to 2 years, and "Level Seed Ale" is aged for 2 years. Even "Session Ale" takes more than half a year. Wild yeast makes fermentation temperature and duration impossible to predict, so they just have to trust the microbes and wait.

Watanabe wrote a book called "The 'Rotten Economy' Found by a Country Bakery," and he is someone who practices an economy in tune with natural cycles. He started the brewery in Chiba in 2008, moved to Okayama after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and then relocated to Chizu Town in 2015 in search of better water.

It's a renovated former Nagi kindergarten, and it includes a bakery, a beer brewery, a cafe, and even a hotel. They also make beers like "Radical Sour Ale," "Cider Ale," and "Belgian White," all of which have the complex flavors that only wild yeast can create.