Region & History

For over a thousand years, Kyoto was the emperor's city, while Osaka was the merchant town where rice, salt, and sake changed hands. The Kansai region, encompassing Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, and Nara, has long known the craft of brewing—just not beer brewing. For centuries, sake took center stage here, a drink made from fermented rice that shares only the process of fermentation with beer.

Beer arrived in the 19th century with foreign traders. Among the early major breweries was Asahi, which by its own account traces its roots to 1889 in Osaka. For decades, a handful of large companies dominated the market with pale lager.

The turning point came in 1994 with a change in the law. The minimum annual production required of a brewery dropped from 2,000 to 60 kiloliters, and suddenly small operations could legally sell beer. They came to be known as Jibiru, or "regional beer." Minoh Beer, in the town of Minoh north of Osaka, was founded in 1997 by Masaji Ohshita, who ran a liquor store. Today, three sisters from his family run the brewery.

In Kyoto, the young craft beer scene arrived later. Kyoto Brewing Company opened in spring 2015, founded by three expatriates: Paul Speed from Canada, Ben Falck from the UK, and Chris Hainge from the USA. By its own account, it was the first brewery to use a Belgian yeast as its house strain. For several years it supplied almost exclusively draft beer, and since 2021 it has also been canning on a large scale.

There's no protected designation of origin for beer from Kansai, and "Kyoto" on a label isn't a protected name. Kizakura, a brewery in Fushimi founded in 1925 by Jirokuro Matsumoto, shows that beer and sake can indeed be made under one roof in this area.