Matsue Local Beer Beer Hearn

If you're talking about craft beer in Shimane, Beer Hearn is an essential name. It's made by Shimane Beer, founded in 1999, and the origin of the name is especially elegant.

It refers to Lafcadio Hearn, the author who lived in Matsue and introduced Japanese culture to the world. Locals affectionately called him "Hearn-sensei." The name carries the wish that this beer will help make Shimane known around the world.

And the representative, Manabu Yano, is quite an interesting person too. He studied engineering, but wanted to make alcohol and joined a sake maker. However, instead of production, he was assigned to machinery maintenance.

Then the local beer boom arrived, and people who could repair brewing equipment were needed. He was promoted to plant manager and learned beer brewing at the Brewing Society of Japan Research Institute in Hiroshima. Yano's philosophy is unique too: he says he wants to make beers that lean toward the edges of a radar chart.

Shimane's food culture tends to be sweet and strongly flavored, including soy sauce. To stand up to that "sweet and rich" table, they intentionally brew beers with bold flavor and aroma. Their flagship "Weizen" won Japan Winner at the 2018 World Beer Awards, and "Orochi" is a doburoku-style beer brewed each year in collaboration with a different sake brewery, using sake rice koji and sake yeast. It's hugely popular with beer geeks.

And "Zeus Bitter" uses 100% Shimane-grown barley malt and hops. They cultivate the "Zeus" hop variety themselves, but hop cultivation in Japan is extremely difficult and the harvest is limited, so it's available almost only within the prefecture.