Craft Heart Brewery

Fukuyama's Craft Heart Brewery is unique right from the location: the brewery is on the first floor of a business hotel, inside Benefit Hotel Fukuyama.

And each brew is only 200 liters. That's just a little more than a household bathtub's worth. But that small size is the key point: because they brew so often, they keep building experience, and they run on a pace of releasing limited beers on the fourth Saturday of every month.

The concept is to source all ingredients from things connected to Fukuyama. Their flagship, Sensui Draft, is a pale ale made with "Kansha no Shio," a natural salt handmade on Sensuijima in Tomonoura, Fukuyama. The minerals bring out the umami, and it pairs really well with food.

They also make Castello Fukuyama Rose. Fukuyama is called the "city of roses," and this is a pink beer made with locally grown edible roses. The city's identity is packed straight into a glass of beer.

It has real quality too. Setouchi Salty Fruit Beer Lemon Gose is a gose-style beer fermented with lactic acid, made with Setoda lemon juice and Setouchi sea salt, and it won gold at the Japan Great Beer Awards. Hiroshima Red Beer also won gold. Gold medals are coming out of these ultra-small 200-liter brews.

They also make Shobara Hop IPA, a limited IPA using locally grown hops cultivated in Shobara, Hiroshima Prefecture. Then there's Ikoi, a medicinal-style beer made with chamomile and brown rice, positioned like a drink before bedtime. Because this was the first brewery in Hiroshima Prefecture to obtain a happoshu manufacturing license, they can freely use supplementary ingredients.