The beer & the brewery
Brewed by people
who live on the water.
We did not choose a contract brewery. We chose neighbours of the water this beer restores: Kaigan Brewery, a small crew in Minamiboso, Chiba, brewing a few hundred metres from the Pacific. Their name means coastline. It fits.
Nami Nami asks a lot of a brewery: the beer has to be genuinely great, and the people behind it have to mean the mission. Kaigan cleared both before we ever asked.
Off the clock, into the water. Minamiboso, Chiba.
The beer we brew together
A Coastal IPL, done properly.
Bright gold and easy to love. Four hops (Citra, Mosaic, Chinook and Liberty) sit over a clean pilsner malt for citrus and tropical notes with a light lift of pine, then finish crisp and dry the way a proper lager should. Five percent, and built for a second round: a beer for long evenings by the water, not a novelty that funds one.
Bright gold · citrus & tropical · a light lift of pine · clean dry finish
Why Kaigan
They lived the mission before we arrived.
Plenty of breweries can make good beer. We needed one whose everyday habits already matched what Nami Nami promises: real quality, real sustainability, and a real stake in the coast.
On the water, not near it
The brewery sits a few hundred metres from the ocean, among rice fields and bamboo. The crew surf the breaks this beer helps protect. When your brewers live on the coastline, restoring it is not a campaign, it is home maintenance.
Quality without shortcuts
No additives, no pasteurization, no chemical stabilizers, and the beer stays below 10°C from tank to pour, because the flavour is the point. As Philippe told The Japan Times, additives “greatly compromise the taste of beer and reduce its overall quality.”
Sustainability as a habit
Spent grain feeds local cattle. Rice farmers’ used casks become beer filters. Brewing waste enriches a nearby blueberry farm, and the farm’s imperfect fruit comes back as beer. A circular routine that was running years before us.
Woven into the neighbourhood
Founded by Philippe and friends around a Tokyo taproom in 2018, brewing in Minamiboso since 2022, and trading favours with the farmers around them ever since. That is the same collective spirit Nami Nami is built on.
Sources: Kaigan Brewery and The Japan Times, Sustainable Japan.
“I always wanted to have my own brewery, so I started this adventure with my friends.”
Philippe Gueulet, brewmaster and co-owner, Kaigan Brewery · in The Japan Times
The place & the people
An 1898 farmhouse, a kura full of tanks.
Kaigan brews inside a renovated kominka built in 1898, with the tanks housed in the old kura storehouse next door, restored in 2021. It started as a dream between friends: Philippe and his crew opened Coaster, their craft beer kitchen in Tokyo, in 2018, and by 2022 the brewery in Minamiboso was live. Mehdy started as a cook at Coaster and grew into the brewery’s creative force, chasing wild ferments and new flavours.
It is a small operation by design: a farmhouse, two brewers, a tight circle of farmers, and the ocean at the end of the street. Exactly the kind of place a beer about the coast should come from.
“We love what we do, and we hope you love it too,” the crew says. We think you will.
Visit Kaigan Brewery Their beers, taprooms and story, in their own words.
Pour it at your place
Great beer, with the coast behind it.
Every can Kaigan brews funds verified restoration of Japan’s coast. Stock it, and your venue joins the collective from day one.