Beams turns a Yokohama select shop over to Tohoku's craft-sake revival

Beams said its BEAMS LIFE Yokohama store, on the first floor of Yokohama Mores, will run a two-week programme called "Tohoku Jousou" (東北醸想 — roughly, "brewing thoughts of Tohoku") from November 20 to December 3, bringing together craft sake, regional food and crafts from across the six Tohoku prefectures, according to a company release.

Four breweries anchor the sake line-up: Inato & Agave, founded in Oga, Akita in autumn 2021 and now also running its own ramen shop, hotel and distillery; haccoba, founded in February 2021 in Odaka, in Minamisoma, Fukushima, which uses a traditional doburoku method and has worked with JR East to turn the local Odaka station building into a brewery and market; Pukupuku Jozo, also based in Odaka, which ferments Hamadori-grown rice without added yeast using techniques borrowed from craft beer; and Heiroku Jozo, in Shiwa, Iwate, which brews unfiltered sake with a germinated-brown-rice starter and local fruit juice. Beams Life and Pukupuku Jozo have also made an exclusive collaboration bottle, "Yuzuhop," built on Pukupuku's "#" series and flavoured with yuzu grown near the brewery and hops, sold only at the Yokohama store for the event.

The food line-up leans on small, long-running regional names rather than headline restaurants: Yamamo, an Akita miso and soy-sauce brewer founded in 1867, will serve an oden made with Tohoku ingredients using a house yeast strain it discovered on its own premises; Onozaki, an Iwaki fish shop founded in 1923, will fry mehikari; and Endo, a Yamagata supermarket whose gesoten (fried squid) won a Good Design Gold Award in 2023, will sell it on-site, alongside dishes from Miyagi's farmer's table mano and, on selected dates, Tokyo's New Classic Tortilla Club and Yamagata's Have a Good Slice. Select-shop label fennica has curated the crafts on sale, including Tsugaru kogin-zashi embroidery from Aomori's Hirosaki Kogin Institute, beech-wood coiled furniture from BUNACO, glasswork made with Hirose River and Sahara Desert sand from Miyagi's Kaiba Glass Studio, and turned-wood kokeshi from Sendai Kiji Seisakusho -- including a piece made for fennica by Yasuhiro Sato, son of certified traditional craftsman Masahiro Sato.

Two of the four breweries, haccoba and Pukupuku Jozo, are based in the same small town, Odaka, on Fukushima's Hamadori coast -- an area evacuated after the 2011 disaster and still rebuilding its population. That both started within the past five years, and that a national select-shop chain is now flying them to its Yokohama floor alongside a bespoke collaboration bottle, says something about how craft sake has displaced rice or produce as the easiest way to tell a regional-recovery story at retail: the brewery's own origin is now as much the product as the sake itself. For Beams, a company that has spent years building fennica's craft-sourcing network, the event is a low-risk way to turn footfall at one lifestyle store into a showcase for six prefectures' worth of small producers it can keep working with afterward.