Kyoto Brewing Co. - Wholesale
国道420号 (Route 420)
An intensely pineapple and resin-like beer made in collaboration with Paint Palette brewing in Kobe. Centered around terpenes, this beer looks to take you on a magical journey that gets you as close as possible to experiencing the aroma of marijuana without breaking any rules!
It incidentally has no connection to Japan's national route 420, which runs through Aichi Prefecture and, as far as we know, there have been no reports of these signs being stolen.
The cannabis plant is a sister plant to hops, and when people talk about "dankness" and "resin" in hop character, it is said that this isn't really too far away in character from the smell of cannabis. Furthermore, just as the growing craft beer industry has led to the cultivation of hops in pursuit of more intense fruity flavours, the north American cannabis industry has gone down a similar path. We decided to design our beers around using hops and targeting flavours that closely share a flavour profile to cannabis (without any of the chemicals that cannabis contains, of course!).
Our beer at KBC is inspired by “Pineapple Express” a very popular cannabis strain in North America that has flavours of sweet, overripened pineapple, pine, and resin. The concept was simple: if it doesn’t add a pineapple or cannabis characteristic in the beer, we didn’t use it. To achieve this flavour, we first looked to manipulating the flavour and mouthfeel with the malt. Using a base of Golden Promise, with wheat and oats giving the beer a hazy appearance and some mouthfeel, we added a touch of flaked rye and honey malt, targeting the pineapple sweetness, with a bit of herbal spice. We used a blend of hops known for the cannabis-like characteristics, including Azacca for its tropical fruit, pineapple and spice. We used Citra for its sweet citrus character, Nectaron for even more tropical pineapple character, and lastly Eggers grown “Special” Riwaka, for its signature dank and resinous tropical character, most closely recognizable to its sister plant.
We fermented this with WHC “Pineapple Passion” yeast to layer on yet another layer of pineapple aroma. Lastly, we added terpenes, which are organic compounds responsible for many of the tropical flavours and aromas in both hops and cannabis. We specifically added a blend of these terpenes that are responsible for the recognizable “Pineapple Express” character in the cannabis strain. This results in a very hop forward IPA with loads of sweet pineapple and resin character. While obviously there is no actual cannabis in this beer, we imagine this is as close to a drinkable version of a very popular cannabis strain that you can have.