Rice-based Beer
Be mindful of Yuki-onna on your next outdoor adventure. If you get lost in the forest, collapse, and are about to die, it is she who will show up to take your last breath.
More comfortingly, she is also the namesake for New Hokkaido Beverage Co.’s Snowy IPA, which, like all of the new Bozeman brewery’s beers and seltzers, is made in part with rice from Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost and second-largest island. New Hokkaido’s founder and owner, Gustav Gentaro Dose, draws a connection between Montana and Hokkaido. He sees each as a relatively wild place where life is still a little freer than in more densely populated regions of their respective countries.
Rice, for Gustav, presents “a different canvas to play with.” Sticking with his analogy, if the beers are canvases, the palette used to paint them is light. Compared to traditional beers, New Hokkaido’s beers are clearer in color, lighter in your mouth, and subtler on your tongue.
Gustav was inspired to pursue rice beers as a personal challenge to confront the prevailing attitudes that rice is a flavorless grain for beer, best used for diluting cheap brews. Having grown up in Japan and after spending time in his twenties on Hokkaido, Gustav knew what could be done with high-quality rice.
In addition to using Hokkaido rice, Gustav sources steamed rices from other regions of Japan, puffed rices from Cambodia, malted rices from Montana, and other rices from around the world.
It was the fairy tales his mother told him during his boyhood in Tokyo that introduced Gustav to Yuki-onna and other yōkai—the spirits of Japanese folklore. Each of New Hokkaido’s beers and seltzers takes its name from a yōkai, whether traditional or imagined by Gustav, and is accompanied by the briefest fairy tale. The Yabai Tanuki Hazy IPA reads: “That swaying old man—no, he’s a monkey. Wait, he’s a rat running between your legs. Look behind you—it’s Yabai Tanuki, laughing and shaking his bag at you.” Bag of what? In legend, tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs) are tricksters with gigantic, multi-purpose testes that can be deployed as weapons.
New Hokkaido’s founder and owner, Gustav Gentaro Dose, draws a connection between Montana and Hokkaido. He sees each as a relatively wild place where life is still a little freer than in more densely populated regions of their respective countries
Getting a sense of the vibe? The aesthetic extends from ingredients and mythology to the can itself. Sally Morrow Creative, of Portland, along with the Tokyo-based designer Emil Homewood, came up with a vibrant design featuring Homewood’s colorful and playful images depicting yōkai that are as captivating as the beer inside.
New Hokkaido represents a cohesive vision that extends from Gustav’s core. “It’s part of me,” he says, adding that he considered the name New Hokkaido several years ago when, after devoting himself to the study of beer, he was ready to open his own brewery. He wanted to honor his heritage and his connection to the remote Japan he loved. But the time didn’t feel right and, after taking into account the view of the Bridgers from the corner of Avocado Street and Plum Avenue, where there was a For Sale sign on an old warehouse, he opted instead for Mountains Walking.
That name—Mountains Walking—derives from the “Mountains and Water Sutra” by the thirteenth- century Buddhist philosopher and founder of Zen’s Sōtō school, Dogen. The “Mountains and Water Sutra” is one book from Dogen’s monumental Shōbōgenzō, a Japanese treasure and one of the great works of Buddhist literature. Gustav has been reading from it weekly for ten years. “It’s an exasperating read,” he says, “but it’s absolutely brilliant.”
Eastern philosophy is important to Gustav. It informs his pithy metaphysics—“Mind is everything”— and motivated him to lead regular meditation sessions at Mountains Walking during off hours before the pandemic. It has also influenced his approach to beer. When Gustav decided it was time to return to the idea for New Hokkaido and launch a new brewery for the sake of experimenting with rice, he conceived of “a phantom brewery” that would be “everywhere and nowhere” like a Zen teaching. “I kind of steer it, but I also want to give it its own life,” says Gustav.
This gentle spirit of experimentation is nicely captured in New Hokkaido’s Yamabiko, a light and smooth rice lager that is delightfully refreshing. In lore, yamabiko are floppy-eared, dog-like yōkai that live in the mountains and are the source of echoes. As the can has it: “Wait, did you hear that? That mountain echo that took too long? Shout again. Now listen. The yamabiko are answering you, somewhere up on that snowy peak.”
Maybe New Hokkaido is everywhere and nowhere, but if you find yourself somewhere in Montana looking up at the mountains and thinking about adventure or mystery, you might know the beers you’ve been waiting for.