Gomyo Brewery

Hiroyuki Hayashida of Gomyo Brewing has a career that already sounds like an adventure novel.

He is from Nishinomiya City in Hyogo Prefecture, and in 1992 he went to Canada to go kayak river running. There he encountered craft beer for the first time and was shocked by it, which became the starting point.

But he didn't go straight into beer. First, in 2013, he joined a long-established soy sauce brewery in Hikida, Higashikagawa City, with more than 250 years of history, and trained in soy sauce making using the traditional 'mushiro koji' method.

No, because both soy sauce and beer are all about fermentation. I think building a foundation in fermentation through traditional soy sauce making has actually become a real strength. In 2015 he shifted to beer brewing, studied brewing in Tokyo as well, founded the LLC Gomyo Brewing in 2017, and started brewing the following year.

This is the interesting part: they renovated a building that used to be a handmade udon shop into a brewery. They also introduced a 'fermentation tank that uses plastic bags,' devised by Iwami Brewery in Shimane, so even on a small scale they can flexibly produce many kinds of beer.

The 'Yuzu Farmhouse Ale' is a saison-style beer made with local yuzu. The 'Black Rice Brown Porter' is another interesting brew. The brewing water comes from underground water in the Gono area, and they also use malt from Tokushima Prefecture, so the brewery makes use of ingredients from Shikoku.