Anesaki Sangyo Festival and one day trip to Choshi City.

After long holidays, we have nice good weathers here in Kisarazu.

　
  Today we brewed Le orage, which is our Spring-Summer Belgian Brown.
  This is lighter than Maltina and has a nice hop character.

   We went to Anesaki - Sangyo Festival with Liquor store "Furukawa - Syoten".
 It was a nice local festival.
　
　And we have bottle beers like picture below.

 　

  ♪ Summer Porter is a 4.5% Belgian Porter. Soft carbonation, easy drinking like an iced coffee.
　

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   Last week we visited Asahi-city and Choshi city.
 We wanted to go to  a good strawberry farm in Asahi,
 but we found a good  meat shop on the road.

　

　They cut meat and make sausage and so on   on the back of the building.
   The price is very reasonable and meats are fresh.
   Some cuts were we have never seen at the supermarkets.

  We bought Croquets and Karaage (Japanese Fried Chicken) for lunch. It was good!

  This picture was taken at Iioka-lighthouse. You can see an endless Horizon!

　

We could see beautiful sky and ocean.
We hope to see night view too.

We drived to Choshi-city. Choshi was a bigger city than we thought.
Inubosaki-lighthouse was renovated to a nice souvenir shop and cafe.
You can also take a walk on the sea shore.

 It's a lot different from Uchibo ocean. Everything look like an art, doesn't it?
  Just looking at Horizon make me relaxed and feel good.

 We will have to visit some other Chiba area, too.
 Enjoy your weekend!　　
　　

Kawamura Memorial DIC museum of Art

　We really appreciate everyone who went to the KADARUBE Craft beer festival.
   The event was postponed because of a typhoon but we were glad to hear that it was well attended.

　We will be at another event in November.
 The details are coming soon!

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   We went to Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art last week.
This is a great museum in Chiba pref., so I want come here over and over again.

There are few customers and it is peacefully silent.
Some swans and ducks were in the pond just like a fairy tail.
There is also a park where you can see some big art works too.

This museum was opened in 1990.
The presidents of this ink company collected the works of great artists of the 20th century, including Picasso, Monet, Rembrandt and American artists in recent years.

We love to see the works of Picasso, Pissaro or Renoir.
And we loved a new room displaying only 2 works of Cy Twombly called "Twombly room".

Our favorite is the "Rothko room" where you can see seven works of Mark Rothko.

We felt the power and enjoyment of the arts.

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We visited a peanut shop called "Masuda" after the museum.
Yotsukaido city is famous for peanuts and it is harvest season.
You can see the peanuts drying on road. 

There are so many places we want to visit in this area.

We will visit them next time.

≪ Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art ≫

　Address : Sakato 631 Sakura City, CHIBA
　Business Hour : 9：30-17：00
　Closed: Monday（Open on holiday and close on next day of the holiday）

New beers and handmade brooms.

The typhoon passed through and the temperature went down a little bit.

This summer is really really hot...

Please take care of yourself and have a nice summer vacation.

We released new beers for summer!

　♪ MOTUEKA PALE ALE … We usually brew this beer for spring but we brewed one more batch for the summer. The Motueka hops flavor also match summer season. We had used malted wheat much more than other batches.  The taste get  better and fresher.（5％）

　♪ SUMMER PORTER … Light dark beer like a cold brew coffee in the summer afternoon.  You can enjoy it slowly of its roasty aroma and malt flavor with low carbonation. （4.5％）

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　We visited the farmer who is growing broom cypress in Sodegaura city.

Our friend is a creator of handmade brooms and he has general shop near our brewery.

 They called us to see the farm. Sodegaura city is a good place for broom cypress. 

　

　

   This is the Broom cypress.　It has seeds like rice.
　The man who creates brooms,  showed us how to crop the cypress rhythmically.
　

　One broom needs about 100 cypress.
  The cypress grown in Sodegaura city is finer quality than other places.
  Soft and thickly bearded cypress are good for made brooms. he said.
  Several farmers are growing cypress for him.

　　He creates very beautiful brooms. They are very tough and the floor gets clean and shine if you sweep with this. And I love to use it. He makes many types of brooms.

      He said he loves brooms so much. So he could keep on creating brooms for 60 years. Some materials for make brooms are in shortage like rattan and wire year by year. But he always create brooms or other things and his wife works in the shop.

　　The real craftsman shop a 5 minutes walk from the brewery.
   Please visit there if you like brooms.

Wheat grown in Chonan town

 The rain falls almost everyday in this season. I love rain.

 We visited the Chonan Farm Unions to buy new harvested wheat. 

  This unmalted wheat is an essential ingredient for the wheat which is used in our  regular beer and some of our seasonal beers, especially our wild beers.

 The wheat, which is grown in Chonan town, takes about an hour from our brewery by car.

  The wheat is harvested at the end of May.   

  It passed some processes like sorting, being dried and it also took the prefecture's inspections. 

  And it is ready for shipping.

   The harvest of this year increased 30% compared to last year.

 We had a look inside the machines in the barn.

　

These are machines for sorting and threshing.

The machines for drying wheat stand on the right side of the picture, continuing on to the back of the room.　It's big.

About 15 members of a union grow wheat from the beginning of the process to the end in this old barn and the yard around it.

 Everybody is tanned and talks with a country accents. They are all cheerful and nice. 

 We found a wheat field by coincidence two years ago.

We were glad we could buy a small amount of wheat.  

　

   We hope we can use these for good beers.

Back from Kyoto

 We passed many mountains and rivers, and we came back to Kisarazu from Kyoto last night.

  We traveled for 4 days. It has been longer than we expected because we visited some people on the road.

   It rained a lot during Kyoto craft beer festa, unfortunately .
 However, The event was crowded all day long.

 We thank everyone involved in the event.

 We had many people come to our place and said "we heard about Songbird from......" We are very grateful that we felt supported even in Kyoto.

 We did some chores today....
 We found some of our vegetables in the garden were eaten by bugs, wondering if we re-plant some or not. we will go back to be normal little by little.

Flowers and Stollen.

It gets really cold in morning and night recently. 

I love the airs it is like frozen.

A lots of flowers blooming beautifully in my yard.

I took some pictures.

Camellia. I love the smells too.

Pink Camellia.

"Tsubaki" in Japanese.

Our wild yeasts came from
these flowers.

But only few flowers bloomed
in the past these years.
This year is great.

What was good for trees?

Kamquat also good harvest year.

The Citrus trees.
Lemon was planted last year, Orange and Yuzu was planted 3 years ago.
We had some fruits from Yuzu tree for first time!
Nothing gives from Orange tree.
But trees are growing bigger. We are glad.

We had ate Stollen for the first time. It was delicious !

The Popular bakery in Kisarazu "Pepper's Pantry" has 2 size of stollen.

It is small one. Good for gift.
Classic style stollen.
　

This stollen from "labo" in Saitama.

Nice bakery and they sells also
 vin-nature / natural wines.

Full of fruits and nuts
and hint of liquor.

We had enjoyed the traditional sweets from Germany in Japan.
Stollen is baked every bakery and sweets shop in Japan.
It is feel little strange but we are happy we could eat it.

No border for great foods!

Nice SOBA noodle Stand in Futtsu.

We had climb the Mt. Nokogiri in Futtsu City couple of weeks ago.

There are several hiking courses to climb.
We had to walk a road called "rear car road" which was built with stone bricks around 1930 to 1970.
( It's good course, you can go easily and walk in nice view. )
It about 2 hours to the top walking slowly.

We could see the beautifull view of Futtsu Port, ships and the waves moving slowly from the top of the mountain. It was like a page from a picture book.

 After hiking, we had lunch at SANGA Soba and coffee stand.
Which is a newly opened hand made SOBA noodle and coffee stand.

 We had Songbird beer and soba-pritz for starters.
The small bowl is a soba miso dip.

Unique menu like fish and chips or curry burst.

The pop design plates are made by local artist.

The hand made soba was delicious.
Tempura of local fish and vegetables was also great.

It was a really nice place to visit just have a coffee.

We want the place like this also in our town.

SANGA  SOBA ＆ COFFEE STAND

Kabaya 2192  Futtsu City, CHIBA

OPEN : 11:00～17:00

（ Check the schdules infomation on their facebook page. ）

https://www.facebook.com/SANGA2192/

New Beer ! FUJI and MIYABI.

　We went to Chiba City for taking a lecture for alcohol beverage salesperson last Wednesday.
  We have to take the lecture every 3 years by new law.

  While I took a lecture,  the brewer went to Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art watching collection of Yukio Fukazawa who was copperplate painter lived in Chiba.

 The exhibition also has work of Chu Asai and Millet.
 I wish i could be there..besides entrance fee was only 300 yen!!

  Please visit if you are interested in.
 You can take unique work shop too.

Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art
　
OPEN HOUR : 9:00-16:30
CLOSED  :  monday




 We met again after the lecture and visited to Syuho Nishiura in Nishi-Chiba.
The shop sells mainly Sake and Wine which are aging in basement cellar.   
Nishiura-san who is a master of the shop has much of passion and knowledge about sake making, and he tries many ways of sake tasting too.

 He told us the time for aging and conditioning is very important for drinks.
 Good sake and wines never taste worse with aging. and some sake and wines are released too early sometime. So, need more time until tast gets well.

 We know the taste of Belgian beer and wild beer changes by time.
 and we thought we should brew beer with idea that time is also our materials.

  And, We released new beers!

  The beer called FUJI and MIYABI.
  These are fermented with spent grapes from Saito winery in Yokoshiba-hikari-machi, Chiba.

  FUJI is based on Belgian wheat of 6.5 ABV.
 Taste fresh sourness and rich mouth feel towards  the bottom.

  MIYABI is based on English red ale 7.5 ABV.
 Which is more malty and unique character of yeast.

  Please read sentence of back label.


 It had been over 2 years from brewing.
The beer's taste has changed while fermenting.
It smells like horse, dust, cooked beans...it was really wild and funky we thought we could not release this beer!
But smell and taste got better around this spring.

We appereciate for Masako-san (who is wine maker) and Saito Winery.
 Saito winery's wine of 2017 will be released soon too!

 Try new unique beers made with essence of Saito winery!

Hirosaki, Kadarube Craftbeer Fes

We had attended to Kadarube Craftbeer Fes 2017 in Hirosaki,

 Aomori last weekend.

It was a nice day for beer.

 

For us it was a first visit to Aomori.

This was the entrance of the festival.

It was a very nice place !

We were open 12:00. Until 1:00, The Festival was full.

There were four breweries, serving 21 kinds of beers.
We met a men who drank all of it.

Some local restaurants served foods.
We had been interested in Sushi restaurant.
It was very nice sushi since Hirosaki is near the ocean.


We usually serve light beers at events,　but we served some beers more than 7% alcohol.

It's good for us to feel the city of Hirosaki and
serve beers directly to customers.

Thank for  everyone who came to the event.
Also Thank for who organised the event ,
especially Yanagita-shoten,degusta!

Beer Garden at Fromage SEN.

A perfect sunny day of Otaki.

We are going to have a beer garden event here!

Fromage SEN is small creamery shop only one day open a month.

Old Japanese house is the shop and beer garden stood by it.

We had 3 Tap beer and 3 kinds bottle beer for to go.

We need procedure for selling bottle beer outside of brewery.

But it was worth for driving customers.   

There were nice food too.

Onigiri shop made with local ISUMI rice, nori (dryed seaweed), salt.

Shop called "Kattan"!

　
 It was really really delicious!
 We tried almost flavor.

 Favorite was "wild rice" and
"Ume".
　

 And Yakitori from "ASAGAO".

It was also goood...
charcoal grilled chicken yakitori are perfect match with beer! 

There is pasture behind the creamery and cows were eating grass.
The barn was clean and no bad smells. Cows looks relaxing.

SEN making cheese with their milk.
She doesn't control milk density in all season.
It's because her cheese taste plain and natural.

Performance by calligrapher Baba and singer song writer Kana Matsumoto started in sunset. Beautiful Bamboo lanterns was created for today.

   Many people visited to small town for good cheese.
   We had so much fun.
　Thank you very much for visiting this event!　

Visiting Cho-nan town.

One day in June, We visited Cho-nan town for get wheat.

We had tried use raw wheat to our some beers before. 

And we would liked to use local wheat to our beer more.

We wanted to try grow wheat ourselves If we had a more place and time. 　

So, we visited a local farmer's union in Cho-nan town.

 The wheat yard are cropped already. They grow the variety called "sato-no-sora"　（witch means suggests "Sky of homeland".)
 They have been growing wheat for 30 years.

 We will use them in our WHEAT!
 We will look forward to how it will turn around!!

We love the area around Cho-nan Town and Mobara City. 
There is many place to visit like Bottle Shop "Chosei-ya", French cuisin "Merle",,,
We stopped by "Cuisson" which is cafe and shop specialized traditional European sweets for tea break.

Waiting for tea we ordered reading book... 

We ordered two kind of teas one of a smoked with pine nuts and the other one a called "Sir Johnson's Special" which served at Novel prize ceremony. 

Tea served with simple cookie.
We ordered quiche and cake too.

Nice tea time！

Shop are next to cafe. Many kind of baked sweets.

Package is also beautiful.

≪ CUISSON ≫

〒297-0075 Oshibi 417-51  Mobara City, Chiba

Business hour：9:00-18:00

Closed on：Mon・2nd Tue

（ Cafe open 11:00～17:00　L.O. 16:30. Closed on：Sun・Mon・2nd Tue ）

　

7 chickens came to our house from Mr. Arai.

We went to see Mr.Arai, who raises chicken for eggs.

He gives  them our spent grain as a part of feed.

He raises them in a natural way.

They give him tasty eggs back.

We are interested in raising chicken for a long time.

We got 7 chickens today.

 Chicken were busy for running (fast!) and sticking the grounds.
All female chicken for giving eggs.
They are living in their society. But a boss is who give feed, Mr. Arai.

Really attractive and cute!

 The day was first of seeing chicken.
We had learn about how to care and raise chicken by books before
and we could asked about raising them from Mr. Arai.


We got 7 old chickens.
(they are over 4 years old)
　　
Hope them like our home.　

「Try it and you can do it !
　Don't have to think difficult.」

　Mr. Arai said.

Welcome to our home, Ladies! 

This one is little bit weak, so we keep away her from others.
　

So Nice to meet you!