Arch Brewery

Arch Brewery is a brewery founded by the Yanagi brothers from Iwakuni, the older brother Masahiro and the younger brother Masahito.

Both of them had gone outside the prefecture for university, but when they came back home, they felt there wasn't much entertainment in town. So they decided, 'Let's do something interesting ourselves,' and focused on the craft beer boom that was taking off worldwide.

Right. They trained at Iwami Bakushu in Shimane and obtained a brewing license. The brewery is only 15 tsubo, and each batch produces 300 to 400 bottles. From milling the grain to fermentation takes about 8 hours, and everything is done completely by hand.

They have five regular offerings alone. ARCH IPA has a great balance of citrus sweetness and hop bitterness, and ARCH STOUT is a dark beer with the sweetness of honey. Their BELGIAN WHITE also uses peel from Sumo Mandarin grown on Suo-Oshima.

They also use mandarins and honey from Suo-Oshima as secondary ingredients, and the spent malt is sent to a poultry farm on Suo-Oshima to be used as feed. It's great how everything circulates within the region.

Iwakuni is famous for Kintaikyo Bridge, right? The name comes from that five-arched wooden bridge. And there's more: if you line up the label stickers of the five standard beers side by side, they connect to form the five arches of Kintaikyo Bridge.