For five years, a warm, inviting light has streamed from a corner street in Tachikawa, a major city in Tokyo Prefecture’s western suburban reaches. The light emanates from the sliding glass doors leading into the taproom at Sakamichi Brewing; an intimate space where revelers and lovers of good beer gather most evenings. Behind the taproom, with its iconic unvarnished wooden tap handles, is Sakamichi’s very own brewery; a small space filled with metallic piping and tanks. A different type of magic happens in both spaces: in the brewery, Sakamichi’s cycle of craft beers are brewed to perfection. In the taproom, customers, both Japanese and international, get to enjoy those beers straight out of the tap.
Sakamichi Brewing is the creation of two foreign residents of Japan: Matthew Boynton, originally from England, and Daniel Bellamy, hailing from the USA. Their friendship originated from a mutual love of cycling that led them on numerous trips around Japan, evolving into a successful business with major indie beer cred in western Tokyo.
Their story can seem an unlikely one. The Japanese craft beer industry is only now reaching a state of maturity, following decades of languishing behind restrictive tax structures. Until recently, the Japanese populace as a whole was perhaps uninterested in more complex beers than the usual seasonal Ebisu offerings.
Now, however, craft beer is finally making itself known throughout Japan. Japanese governmental licensors have become more friendly to smaller establishments; for the first time, craft beer is a viable business at smaller scales. [1] Amongst these changes, Sakamichi has staked out its place amongst the best local beers in Tokyo – even if you’ll have to take a train out west to sample it.
On a recent snowy Tachikawa day, I sat down with Matthew and Daniel (over a delicious pint of their crisp “Tipsy-T” razcherry sour ale) at their brand-new Sakamichi North venue. There, we discussed their craft beer journey, current 5th-anniversary celebrations, the state of the industry, and what beer enthusiasts have to look forward to in Japan’s craft scene.
Matthew and Daniel of Sakamichi Brewing at their new Sakamichi North location. Photo by author.
Lifting a Pint to the Japanese Beer Scene
Q: The first thing I’ll ask you is actually about the beer that I’m drinking right now. It’s a “Razcherry” sour ale – it’s a new one, right?
Matthew: So, when we were planning to open Sakamichi North, we did a crowdfunding campaign on Campfire. The top tier of support that people could offer was “Make a Beer with Us.” We limited it to just five people. They all got snapped up almost immediately, which was pretty cool. We sort of asked them, “What kind of beer do you want to make?” Like, coordinate with us on the recipe. And the most important things of all: pick the name of the beer. Really, the reason we’re in the business is to put up silly names for the beer.
(Previous Sakamichi beers have included such names as: “Mount Crushmore,” a Mountain IPA; “Mr. Bones,” a Milk Stout; and “Hop Executor,” a DDH Imperial Pale Ale made for the colloquial May 4th Star Wars holiday.)
Matthew: Then they got to come to the brewery for brewday itself. The “Tispy-T” was made in coordination with one of our top-tier supporters. He really likes sour beers. He’s also from Switzerland – and we got hold of some Swiss cherries! We had cherry puree, which we used in the beer, as well as some Oregon raspberries. And yeah, I think it’s come out really well. It has a little bit of sourness, and a little bit of sweetness to balance it out. It’s almost like a glass of raspberry lemonade. And at an ABC of 6%, like all of our beers, it is dangerously crushable.
Sakamichi North: The Newest Addition to the Suburban Tokyo Craft Scene
Q: That’s great. So, I want to talk to you about the history of Sakamichi – but first, let’s talk about the big news: the opening of your new location: Sakamichi North. Can you tell me about the genesis of this new location, so close to Tachikawa Station?
Daniel: Our first location (about a seven-minute walk west of Tachikawa Station) has been and continues to be a really great location for us. It really suited our needs when we first opened up. And it has the space to have a tap room within the brewery. But, if you were to split the area around Tachikawa Station into four quadrants, it’s kinda in the quietest one. We don’t get a lot of foot traffic out there, except for people who live in that area. It continues to be our nice, cozy home base with a lot of regular customers. But in looking for a second location, we wanted somewhere a little more lively, with a little more foot traffic. A little bit more in the middle of everything.
Q: Did you consider locations elsewhere in Tokyo beyond Tachikawa?
Daniel: We didn’t necessarily limit ourselves to Tachikawa. But the brewery is in Tachikawa, and we’re proud to be in Tachikawa, so when this space opened up, it pretty much met all of our needs.
Q: Being so close to the station must be a real boon. Sakamachi North is only about one block away from the north exit.
Daniel: There’s a few train lines that converge in Tachikawa. Say you work in central Tokyo, and you take the Chuo Line to Tachikawa and transfer to the Monorail to go to your home station. Our original place isn’t that far from the station, but if you’re just changing trains, it’s a little bit distant to say, “I’ll just pop out and have a beer before I get my train home.” Whereas the new location is a lot more accessible for a pop-in drink on the way back from work.
“A Node in the Culture of Tachikawa”
Matthew: Tachikawa North opened in December of 2024, and so far, so good. One of our goals is to be, if not quite like a British pub, a sort of node in the culture of Tachikawa. In other words, a place where people can come and coordinate events and meet people. In fact, one of the events that we do is a monthly craft beer run. The local running store organizes the route, and we organize the beer. Everyone who finishes the run in a Sakamichi-branded T-shirt gets a free beer at the entrance. We’ve been able to do that from our new location.
Q: Speaking of which, can you tell me a bit about your connection to Tachikawa? How does the local clientele interact with Sakamichi Brewing?
Daniel: When Matthew and I started developing this idea and were looking at where we wanted to put it, Tachikawa seemed like a great location. There’s a lot of people here, a lot of train lines joining here. You’re still in Tokyo, but you can get into the countryside pretty quickly. It’s a great hub location for West Tokyo where people gather to do their drinking, their shopping, go out on dates; all of that kind of stuff.
But when we first opened, there wasn’t a lot of craft beer either. That market was kind of underserved. At the same time, there were enough customers in the area to make it viable. We also heard from other restaurant owners that Tachikawa locals really love to support local businesses. It’s quite a big city, with the full range of the usual chain bars and restaurants. But it’s also full of tons and tons of tiny little locally-owned restaurants and bars. Of course, not everybody is a success, but we’ve found that people in Tachikawa really are interested in supporting a local Tachikawa brewery.
Support in Tough Times
Matthew: There were some fairly tough times when we first opened. It was right in the middle of the pandemic. And I remember one particular event, where the ruling had come down that we were gonna have to stop serving alcohol for an indeterminate amount of time. So, we held an event to try and finish up everything that we had in our fridge; we put the call out to our customers. And the response was quite extraordinary. That night, the tap room was absolutely packed. Everyone was delighted every time a kegger kicked. We were wiping the on-tap beer names off the boards, one after another. Seeing people come together like that to support us, even when we hadn’t been in business for that long; it was very gratifying.
Q: Tachikawa is certainly an interesting location. When I lead hikes up Mount Takao in far western Tokyo as part of Unseen Japan Tours, we often stop off at your taproom as a capstone to that day trip.
Matthew: I think we get a lot of people who are heading back into Central Tokyo from being up in the mountains, or in the countryside. My general theory is that the center of Tokyo is moving westwards as well. There’s no room east – you just hit Tokyo Bay. So the only space for people to move is out west. So, who knows in – another 10 or 15 years, this could be the center of Tokyo.
The Birth of Sakamichi
Q: So, let’s walk this back a bit and talk about the origins of Sakamichi Brewing. What was the process that led to the genesis of this business?
Matthew: So, I had been working at a couple of different breweries in Japan. I worked at Baird Beer in Shizuoka, and then at Ishikawa Shuzo here in Tokyo. And I was foolish enough to think that it was time for me to set up my own thing. I was planning on leaving there and going independent. Around about the same time, Dan had just come back from what had been quite a long time abroad.
Daniel: I got a little burnout and I left Japan, taking a two-year bike tour down the coast of America and through Central and South America. I came back to Japan afterward and was at a little bit of a loose end, but maybe not quite willing to step back into some kind of corporate job. I wanted to do my own thing; something a little bit unique. Actually, in my younger days, I did a lot of manual labor jobs. A lot of carpentry and woodworking; things like that. And there’s something quite rewarding about actually making something and being able to quantify your work. Like, even working behind the bar, right? You can look at the number of customers that came through and say, “I did this today,” right? “I hope these people have a good time and enjoy some good beers.”
A Hilly Road
Q: Tell me about how you two met.
Matthew: Cycle touring. We actually have some photos on the wall you can check out. We got to know each other by riding bicycles throughout Japan. That’s actually where the name “Sakamichi” (坂道, “Hill Road”) comes from!
During trips, we would often find ourselves having to ride up a staircase or, on one memorable occasion, along the top of a sea wall for a few kilometers. And the (facetious) line was always, “What an interesting road! What an interesting road we found here.” So when it came time to start the company, that phrase was quite resonant. We couldn’t translate it directly, but we wanted to have something that was easy to say in Japanese and in English, and was recognizably Japanese. So that’s where the “Sakamichi” came from.
A lot of people have remarked that the road on which the brewery is located is not steep at all. But it’s a nice opportunity to tell that story. I also think that the process of starting your own beer brewery is a fairly steep road.
Craft to the Future
Q: How has the Japanese craft scene evolved in the five years since you established Sakamichi Brewing?
Matthew: I think over the last five or six years, independent of us, the quality of craft beer in Japan has increased extraordinarily. And a lot of this came down to timing. When global shipping completely ground to a halt, that coincided with the increase in good quality, locally-brewed craft beer. And so it was suddenly a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive to buy beer imported from America, New Zealand, the UK, what have you. But the beer here in Japan was of an equal or even a better quality, because it’s so fresh, right? Somebody can package your beer on a Monday, send it out on a Tuesday, and you can be drinking it on a Wednesday. You can’t do that with beer from overseas, you know?
So, that’s been a really big change just over the last five years. A lot of those breweries are quite large, but many are very locally focused. They support a very local area. The scale of operations here in Japan is so much smaller than it is in the US, for example. The US is kind of the north star of the global craft beer industry, right? We had the annual Japan Brewers Cup recently, and I was able to chat with a few visiting brewers from America. When I told them about the scale of our operations here, they almost couldn’t believe how small Japanese breweries are compared to the scale of those in the US. But that means that we just really focus on our local area rather than trying to produce beer for a country the size of the US.
Encountering the Cans
Q: These days, you encounter craft beer in spaces that would have been unimaginable fifteen or twenty years ago. There’s a certain amount in groceries and convenience stores around the country. Of course, many of these are “craft” beers made by massive companies. What’s your perception of this change?
Daniel: It all comes down to scale. Most small-scale craft beer producers like ourselves aren’t making enough beer to be able to can it and get it into supermarkets. You can maybe get into convenience stores locally, cause a lot of those are franchises; you’re dealing with an owner of that particular convenience store rather than a huge chain. But if you’re talking about getting craft into a supermarket chain, they’re dealing with potentially thousands and thousands of cans, like a massive order every month. Most of the breweries that are operating in Japan nowadays just don’t have that kind of scale.
I mean, in our case, we’re not canning at all right now. We would like to be, but even if we were, we wouldn’t be able to produce enough to supply places in Tachikawa alone. Whereas a company like Kirin can start Spring Valley, they can begin making beers in more modern craft beer styles; pale ales, and IPAs. But they have the production scale behind them to produce in quantities, and the business relationships to get beer into the supermarkets and convenience stores that people go to every day.
Matthew: I’d add that I think that the scale at which large corporations produce beer makes it a fundamentally different product than what we make. Under modern capitalism, it’s common for people to feel a sense of alienation regarding the products they consume. Because that’s what they are; just products that they consume.
Whereas the beer that we make here– the people who live in our neighborhood know who we are. We talk to people in the streets. They can come to the brewery and look through the window and see us at work. You can see the raw ingredients that we use. You can taste and experience the beer differently than you would something that is a fungible product; something made in a massive facility somewhere in the countryside that you don’t understand, using huge machines that are beyond the limit of human comprehension. That’s just a different product. Maybe we’re using similar ingredients, similar processes, similar recipes. But the big corporations are missing that connection, which makes the business a very different beast.
The Tachikawa Locals Learning to Love Craft Beer
Q: Tell me a bit about Sakamichi’s clientele. Is it a pretty equal balance between local Japanese Tachikawans and foreign residents looking to get their craft beer fix?
Daniel: In terms of demographic breakdown, our customer base is probably 90% Japanese and 10% foreign. But yeah, we do benefit a little bit from having the base nearby. [Editor’s note: Sakamichi is near JSDF Camp Tachikawa and U.S. Air Base Yokota Japan.] Tourists and foreign residents in Japan may have a higher per capita interest in craft beer, although I think the percentage is growing in Japan as well. But we knew that opening in a place like Tachikawa would mean serving many customers unfamiliar with craft beer. So, we made a lot of decisions in terms of our price and the kind of beer that we make and serve to meet that audience.
We still have people coming in and say, “What’s the most normal beer you have? Ichinban futsu no beer.” It is a pretty regular question. You know, if you don’t know anything about craft beer, then starting off with the cherry raspberry sour might not be quite what you’re looking for. You can save that for the second visit. So yeah, being mindful of first-time customers, we help them learn about craft, and in that way, turn first-time customers into future second, third, and fourth-time customers. Understanding that people are coming in here for different reasons and with different goals and with different backgrounds in craft beer– I think that’s an important part of this business, and probably any business.
Q: That makes sense. Is the “Shibasaki Session” Session IPA a beer you might recommend to a first-timer?
Daniel: It’s our flagship beer. I think it’s maybe a little bit too bitter for people who come in and say, “I want something like a Japanese macro lager.” But we always do have a lager or two on tap, usually with some dry hops to make it a little more aromatic. So, we do often recommend the Shibasaki Session, but sometimes we go with a lager as well. The hope is that people can taste something a little bit different in that beer. And then, you know, maybe they drink that the first few times. And then they branch out after that and start trying other things. From there, they may move on to an IPA… or even a sour.
A Taste of Things to Come
Q: Lastly, would you care to introduce a specific beer to our reading audience?
Matthew: We’re constantly brewing new and seasonal beers, so there’s a lot of tap turnover. Of course, there’s Shibasaki Session, our standard. We try to have that on tap all the time, in both our original location and in Sakamichi North. It’s not that strong, at only 4.5%, but we try to cram a lot of charcter right there. So it uses a lot of Amarillo hops, which have a kind of dank, citrusy, grapefruity kind of character. Really nice, very flavorful, but also very crushable.
Tomorrow, I will be kegging the anniversary IPA. Every year we make an anniversary IPA, which is usually a hazy double IPA. Recently we’ve been building up our connections in our relationships with hop growers in New Zealand. So we used a lot of New Zealand hops in this one, including one called Kohia Nelson, which is a blend of hops and dried passion fruit. I tried some on Friday evening, pouring a little bit off the tank to check the gravity. It smelled pretty incredible, so I’m looking forward to carrying that.
One that’s coming back soon is the “Mr. Bones.” That was one where the entire concept for the beer came to me all at once. It was like, who would drink a milk snout? Well, obviously, an extreme skeleton who loves dangerous sports and is always breaking his bones. And of course, what’s his name? His name is “Mr. Bones.” So that all came together all at once. It’s been a while since we’ve last had that one, so it’s nice to revisit some of the recipes we haven’t been to for a while. We like making new things, but also we have a few standards that people look forward to coming back to.
Excellent. Thanks so much for your time, guys – and thanks for the beer!
Sakamichi Brewing is celebrating its 5th anniversary over the coming weekend. You can visit them at their new Sakamichi North location, or at their original brewery and tap room. You can also listen to Matthew and Daniel’s podcast, Sakamichi Nights – maybe even the episode featuring yours truly. Drink responsibly.
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Sources
[1] Lyman, S. and Bunting, C. (2019). The Complete Guide to Japanese Drinks. Tuttle.
