Sunao Brewery

There’s a brewery called "Sunao Brewery" in Yokote City, Akita, and its origin story is really great.

It’s Yokote City’s first craft beer brewery. It’s run by a female brewer named Nagisa Tsugawa. She’s from Yokote, left the prefecture for university, worked as a salaried employee in Tokyo, then trained at a brewery for four years before coming back home.

Actually, the Daio district of Yokote City has a long history of hop cultivation going back to 1971. At its peak, 133 farms were growing hops on 62 hectares, but now that’s shrunk to 20 farms and 16 hectares. The quality is nationally recognized, but the hops are only sold as ingredients to major companies, so the growers’ names never appear.

That’s exactly why Tsugawa decided to make beer that puts Yokote-grown hops front and center. Their white-style beer called "Gin-ga" uses 100% Yokote-grown hops and 30 kg of raw wheat from Ogata Village. It’s a bold recipe that challenges the use of unprocessed raw wheat.

Normally, breweries use malted grain, so using raw wheat as-is is quite challenging. They also make a Wine Ale called "272" in collaboration with odashima grape, a grape farm in the same Yokote City, brewed with wine yeast. "Full Dream" is their flagship beer, made with Yokote-grown hops and koji.

They also run a birthday beer project where they brew beer with sweets to coincide with the birthdays of the brewer and the hop farmer. It really embodies the idea of a simple connection between producers and consumers.