AEB BREWING Creative Collab: CraftRock Brewing & Busa dei Briganti COLD IPA

Let’s hand it over to the two brewers, who will introduce themselves and share insights about this new AEB Brewing Creative Collab, including tips for brewing an excellent Cold IPA.

• 1) Ryo, could you share a bit about your background, your journey in the beer industry, and what you love most about your work?
  

  My journey began in 2011 at a beer bar called DevilCraft, and I’ve been involved in brewing hands-on since 2015, when DevilCraft started crafting its own beers.  

  From 2019 I’ve visited nearly 1,000 breweries across Japan and abroad, constantly expanding my knowledge by exchanging insights with brewers worldwide. I channel these experiences into creating imaginative and original beers.
  
  

• 2) Could you tell us a bit about CRAFTROCK Brewery—its vision, values, history, and what sets it apart?
  

  CRAFTROCK BREWING has been based in downtown Tokyo, Nihombashi, since 2019. We’re passionate about music, frequently collaborating with bands and organizing an annual Rock Festival.  

  Since 2011, our company has also operated 18 pubs across Japan under the name Craft Beer Market, making us one of the largest independent craft beer companies in the country. We’re dedicated to brewing exceptionally clean, drinkable, and creative beers!

• 1) Davide, can you tell us how it started and how your journey in the world of beer is continuing?
  

  My journey began in 2009, working for a national beer distributor, opening and managing their first beer shop. Subsequently I obtained a master's degree in brewing technology, which opened the doors of the Birra del Borgo brewery to me. From there I dealt with production and quality in breweries of different sizes around Italy like Amarcord and Crak Brewery, finally ending up here at the Busa Dei Briganti. This new season of my career is dedicated to research and expanding my professional boundaries, which I can do by strategically collaborating with important supply companies and creatively collaborating with other breweries

• 2) Tell us a bit about the Busa dei Briganti, and how would you define the beers you produce?
  

  The Busa Dei Briganti brewery was born in Padua, first as a nano brewpub and then moving in 2019 to become an agricultural brewery located in the municipality of Cinto Euganeo (Padua), in the middle of the Euganean Hills. I would define the brewery and the vision behind it with two adjectives. The first is ‘conscious’. The brewery is conscious of its means, of the context from which it comes and of the importance of the agricultural dimension in which it operates, as well as the artisanal and entrepreneurial ones, too.  Secondly it is ‘unconventional’, in as much as we produce beers that mainly appeal to us who make them, without caring too much about trends and fashions, working independently of both the constraints of traditional thought and the equally stringent ones, of going against the tide at any cost.

• 4) Can you describe the finished beer and tell us the story behind the name?
  The basic idea was to recreate a beer that had the distinctive characteristics of an American-style Cold IPA but using only Continental raw materials, in fact the cereal base is composed exclusively of pilsener malt grown by our company and Carnaroli variety rice originally from Grumolo delle Abbadesse (Slow Food presidium) and for the hop sector we decided to use Tango,  Ariana and Callista; new varieties of hops developed in recent years that reproduce American characteristics, although bred and grown in Germany. And FERMOLAGER W.  The finished beer is full of citrus and tropical notes on the nose with a herbaceousness typical of German hops. In the mouth the aromatic bouquet is accompanied by a dryness conferred by the rice without, however, leaving a purely watery mouthfeel. The cleanliness of the yeast has been able to enhance the organoleptic contribution of both cereals and hops. The name comes from the City Hunter manga, where, in order to call upon him to help you, you had to write on the blackboard of Shinjuku XYZ station. The idea came to me because the protagonist in the manga and the brewer of Craftrock have the same name and I called upon him to help me in this creative collaboration.
  
  
• 5) What other AEB products do you use?
  I find Brewmix Plus excellent, I especially use it in beers where the diastatic power of the cereals is low, or when, thanks to the use of barley substitutes, I have high concentrations of beta-glucans and I want to avoid a mash high viscosity affecting the quality of lauter-tun filtration.