Hope Hill Brewery

The Sennan factory of Hope Hill Brewery is pretty interesting. It’s a brewery attached to a restaurant that Rikyu, the beef tongue chain, opened in Kakuda City. They started brewing in Kakuda in May 2024.

Exactly. Rikyu’s Kakuda location serves not only gyutan but also pasta and pizza, and you can drink freshly brewed craft beer there. It operates as a second brewery site alongside the one at the main factory in Iwanuma.

For the Kakuda location’s first anniversary, they released a limited beer called "Goshinikeru Shu." It was a special, limited-quantity brew. The regular lineup is strong too, with beers like Culotte, a saison made with Miyagi-grown yuzu, and THE SPENCER, a West Coast IPA.

Actually, they’re all names of cuts of meat. Culotte is rump, and SPENCER is rib roast. Pretty fitting for a gyutan place, right? Head brewer Yosuke Ohira is a true die-hard who wrote his university thesis on German beer, and he seriously pursues beers that pair well with gyutan.

Culotte won the Japan Origin category championship at the International Beer Cup, and THE SPENCER also won bronze. It looks like we can expect more beers that make use of local Kakuda ingredients in the future too.