South of Tokyo, a Heavy Metal Beerpocalypse at Yggdrasil Brewing

Brian SpencerMarch 18, 2020

“An ash I know there stands, Yggdrasil is its name, a tall tree, showered with shining loam. From there come the dews that drop in the valleys.” – Völuspá, from Poetic Edda

When Shinsui Mori moved back to Japan following a stint at Godspeed Brewery in Toronto, Godspeed’s founder, Luc Lafontaine, helped him get his foot in the door at an old friend’s new brewery in Hiratsuka, about 65 kilometers south of Tokyo. Mori of course had the requisite brewing credentials but, perhaps just as importantly, he also had the personal recommendation passed from one friend, Lafontaine, to another, Davido Gardahaut.

Mori got the interview with Gardahaut. And here is where we learn how Gardahaut runs things at Yggdrasil Brewing; here is where we begin to understand the ethos, the inspiration, and the foundation of what Gardahaut has built in this sleepy seaside commuter city. For to hear the 42-year-old Frenchman Gardahaut tell it, Mori sealed the deal simply by understanding that, as Mark Twain once said, “clothes make the man.”

“He came to the interview wearing an Obituary t-shirt, so I realized he was a metalhead and was like, okay, you’re in,” Gardahaut says with a laugh. “Obituary actually came to Japan this month, so I got [Mori] a guest pass and we brought beer to drink with the band. That’s how it works here—that’s the staff bonus.”

Roll Right, Roll Call

Yggdrasil Brewing can fit into a small restaurant, which we know because it took over a space previously occupied by a pizzeria; the three-barrel brewhouse sits in the same spot as the old pizza oven. The place is located on a nondescript, mostly residential street a few minutes’ walk from Hiratsuka Station one way, and the stark Sagami Bay beachfront the other. On a bright mid-winter weekday afternoon there’s little activity on the street and even less to see; I wish I could romanticize it for you, but hyperbole has no place here.

Well, there are two things, actually, or rather two collections of things. Plastering either side of Yggdrasil Brewing’s austere wooded entrance, like collages on the walls of that fetid bathroom stall you once devastated at a Melvins show, are bunches of stickers offering a preview of what lies indoors. Deftones, Slayer, In Flames, Pantera, Dimmu Borgir, Iron Maiden—the roll call of metal and hardcore bands represented here may not precisely reflect the brewpub playlist, but it’s close. Craft brewery stickers cover the opposite wall, and would you be surprised to learn there’s one for TRVE Brewing Co, “Denver’s true heavy metal brewery,” among them?

The bar doesn’t open until five, so mornings and afternoons are reserved for brewing business in what we might call the Yggdrasil Brewing kitchen. When I arrive Gardahaut is still on a train rumbling south on the Tokaido Line from Shinagawa Station; Mori chats with Shiokaze BrewLab founder Chris Poel about malts while an assistant kegs a West Coast-style IPA.

There’s some contract brewing in Japan, but due in part to prohibitive taxes not as much as in other parts of the region. Shiokaze BrewLab is one of the comparative few that does it, at least for now. After spending a decade at Baird Beer in Shizuoka—five as lead brewer and five as director of brewery operations—Poel struck out on his own in mid-2019 and will continue brewing his recipes at Yggdrasil until he launches the Shiokaze tasting room and brewery later this year in Chiba Prefecture.

“It’s a perfect situation for both of us. Yggdrasil has excess capacity, I trust Davido and Shin to take care of Shiokaze beers when I’m not there, and I can have fun experimenting with ingredients and processes that I’m not all that familiar with,” says Poel. “It’s been an enjoyable, symbiotic relationship.”

It’s quiet before Gardahaut shows up dressed in all black, including a t-shirt bearing the brewery’s Viking “tree of life” logo; you may recognize a similar version on the cover of Opeth’s 2011 album Heritage. Gardahaut is all big and easy smiles. Grey streaks pepper his black beard and long black hair stretching halfway down his back. He looks the part of a fortysomething headbanger because he is one.

He takes a seat at the bar in front of several empty cans of the Stone Brewing/Metallica collaboration Enter Night, and Mori flips a ceiling-mounted television to an old video of Faith No More ripping Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in London. I mention Ozzy Osbourne’s recent Parkinson’s diagnosis. “Ozzy has Parkinson’s? I didn’t realize that. There’s been so much awful news that I stopped reading it,” says Gardahaut. “First [Rush drummer] Neal Peart passes away, a few weeks later it’s the Divine Heresy bassist [Joe Payne]… these days there are so many bands disappearing, so these vintage metal videos cheer me up.”

“Are you into metal, as well?,” he asks me. “What kind of, er, sub-genre?”

Escape from the Prison Planet

Spanning roughly 1,200 miles and linking greater Tokyo to the east with Osaka to the west, the Tokaido Corridor is Japan’s economic lifeblood, today accounting for at least 70-percent of the country’s population and most manufacturing. It became one of Japan’s most trafficked trading and transportation routes during the Edo period (1603 – 1868), leading to the development of several traveler-friendly post towns along the way. A railway between Tokyo and Kōbe landed in the 1880s and Hiratsuka Station opened in 1887, kickstarting Hiratsuka’s commercial and residential growth.

Like so many other parts of Japan, Hiratsuka suffered staggering infrastructure damage and loss of life during Allied air raids in World War II. Almost half the city was destroyed and at least 250 people were killed by the time bombings ended in 1945. With heavy hearts, Hiratsuka remade itself within a decade or so.

Bordered by the verdant Tanzawa Mountains to the northwest and Sagami Bay to the south, the city is now home to roughly 250,000 people. Major Japanese companies like Canon, Kansai Paint, and Nissan Shatai have production plants here, though many residents commute back and forth between Tokyo. The Shonan Bellmare football team, which has maintained its place in the Japan Professional Football League’s top J1 tier four of the past five years, calls Hiratsuka home.

Mostly, though, this is just a laid-back beach town that’s part of the Shōnan coast’s growing surf scene; it’s breathing room away from big-city life.

In a country where craft beer is still a drop in the ocean of beer consumption—particularly outside of Tokyo and Osaka—Hiratsuka seems a curious place to install something as doubly niche as a heavy metal brewpub. Perhaps, but for all his love of loud music Gardahaut prefers a quieter life in a community more connected than what he experiences in Tokyo, where he says rents are insane and bar experiences often impersonal. “In Tokyo the staff are like 20-year-old university students who don’t give a fuck. They won’t talk to you.”

He still lives there, but plans to relocate to Hiratsuka once his daughter graduates. “It’s a good balance here between city and countryside, halfway between central Tokyo and Shizuoka,” he explains. “There’s a community spirit. People are much more friendly and outgoing. They give presents all the time.”

Gardahaut says a customer gave him the bar’s well-loved speakers, for example, and that the big boxes of hyuganatsu (grapefruit-sized, mildly sweet oranges) stashed in the corner of the bar were a gift from a neighbor. He plans to use them in an upcoming brew, and notes that gift-giving goes both ways. “We have a guy who picks up our spent grain every week, then dumps it at a chicken farm two stations away for compost—but they haven’t given us any chickens yet.”

There’s also something to be said for being the last call for good beer on Tokyo’s stalwart commuter line. In Chigasaki, one station east, there are beer bars and breweries like BarbaricWorks, Shonan Beer, and Beer Café HOPMAN. Yggdrasil Brewing is the only option in Hiratsuka, however, and from there it’s beer wasteland until Odawara five stations later.

“The closest option to drink fresh beer,” says Gardahaut, “is to come here.”

Take This Bottle

For someone who came of age in France drinking Belgian and German beers that didn’t cost more than a few euros, Gardahaut was shocked by the price tags attached in Japan to overseas IPAs, beers which generally speaking are best fresh. “When I came here I didn’t understand why people pay such high prices for oxidized, two-month-old imports,” he says. “They’ll pay 1,000 yen [~US$10] or more for an old can of IPA; I’d rather drink it fresh from the source. That’s what craft beer is supposed to be about.”

Most craft breweries around the world understand the blessing and curse that is the IPA, by far the most in-demand beer style among craft drinkers. It’s a particularly complicated dilemma for a small-batch brewery like Yggdrasil Brewing, which only brews about 2,000 liters a month and must juggle the somewhat disparate tastes of brewpub regulars with the wants of Japan at large.

This winter, for instance, locals have quickly drained several dark beers—strong Belgians, porters, a weizenbock—and clamor for more, but there isn’t as much of a market for them outside Hiratsuka. “Just yesterday some people were begging me for more of the weizenbock, telling me it tastes like pancakes and is the perfect winter beer, so I put it on the schedule,” Gardahaut says. “The hard part though is that bars in Tokyo, like Mikkeller, don’t really want dark beers. Outside of here, when we sell kegs it’s IPA, IPA, IPA.”

When I visit only two of the eight beers on tap are IPAs. Like in the world of Star Wars there won’t soon be a satisfying answer to the matter of balancing light with dark at Yggdrasil Brewing, but Gardahaut recently attempted a middle ground in a collaboration with Riot Beer, a nanobrewery in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward. “For our Motorhead tribute beer I had an image of Jack Daniels and Coke and really wanted to do a black beer, so I thought we should make a black IPA,” he says. “We hadn’t made one yet, and since it’s an IPA it should have a wider range of drinkers—Motorhead fans, our locals, and our IPA bars hopefully will like it.”

Market complexities aside, when I ask Gardahaut if there’s a defining approach he takes to Yggdrasil beers, he cites his time in Quebec as a formative experience. The Quebec beer scene, he says, embodies in many ways the European beer culture of taking a little from here and a little from there to make something distinctive. Gardahaut says, “I like to use a lot of European ingredients, but in an international style, and of course I add some Japanese twists,” citing as one example a recent saison brewed with mikan, a tangerine-like Japanese fruit. “We use French yeasts, almost all German malts, and around 90-percent of our hops are from Alsace.”

“I want drinkability, and I like beer to be dry, like, you get a lot of flavor, and then oh! My mouth is dry and I need more.”

As Clutch’s epic set at Wacken Open Air 2016 blasts on the bar television, Gardahaut pours us glasses of the cleverly named Vulgar Display of Lager, an IPL (India Pale Lager) and homage to Pantera measuring an appropriate 6.66%. Yggdrasil brewed it on December 8, the day that in 2004 Pantera guitarist “Dimebag Darrell,” then performing with his band Damageplan, was brutally murdered onstage by a crazed fan. Made with French lager yeast, it has fruit-forward hops, mild bitterness, and a crisp finish, exactly the type of profile to which I think Gardahaut aspires when he says he’s trying to develop a more consistent house flavor.

Gardahaut, who used to work in concert promotion and still books up-and-coming Japanese metal bands into the annual Wacken festival, likens Japanese craft breweries to indie metal bands like End All, which collaborated with Yggdrasil on Vulgar Display of Lager. “It’s like we have these big playgrounds where you create your own kind of art and distribute it yourself,” he says. “But these communities are very small. End All will release their new album at a venue in Shibuya that holds 250 people. For us there are more and more beer bars in Tokyo, but if you go to places like Chiba Prefecture it’s no-man’s land.”

With its band collaborations and tribute beers, both of which Gardahaut hopes to do with greater frequency, Yggdrasil Brewing is attempting to build something bigger out of Japan’s closely knit metal and craft beer communities. Gardahaut cites the Iron Maiden Trooper beers, which a friend imports to Japan from Robinsons Brewery (Stockport, England), as the type of crossover project that can help craft beer find new audiences. “What I like is that not only craft beer drinkers will drink it, but also rock fans and people at metal bars,” he says. “Some Trooper beers are distributed here in record stores.”

Of course, those types of beers also sing to the choir. IPA or not, Gardahaut consistently finds receptive buyers of Yggdrasil Brewing kegs at metal-themed beer bars like Brewpub Truth and Gremlin in Tokyo and Craft Beer Bar Koumin in Osaka. “The manager at Craft Beer Bar Koumin is actually a metalhead, so I’ve known him for awhile and he gets every metal-related beer from us,” Gardahaut says. “It’s cool that we have this metalhead network in craft beer.”

Roots, Bloody Roots

As conversation drifts as much to metal as it does beer, I ask Gardahaut what he’s listening to these days during his commutes between Maguro and Hiratsuka, roughly an hour each way. He says he got completely addicted to Tool’s latest album, Fear Inoculum, an ambitious 80-minute, radio hit-free opus that’s been critically praised, but predictably polarized fans who waited 13 years for new music. This fan, at least, considers it a piece of art.

Yggdrasil Brewing — Shinsui Mori (left) and Davido Gardahaut

During the colder months, however, it’s a lot of Viking metal, which makes sense since the brewery draws its name from Norse mythology. Yggdrasil is a giant ash tree of great significance, a holy “tree of life” referenced in Norse poems and literature dating to the thirteenth century. It was said to sit at the exact center of the Norse cosmos, its mighty roots and branches extending to the network of Nine Worlds.

“I am a heavy metal Viking at heart,” Gardahaut says. “But Viking metal is drinking metal; it’s not that serious, more like comics or animation. The stories are always about fire, battles, deaths, and heroes in different wars and eras. They are never pro this or that, never political—just stories about some guys.”

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Yggdrasil Brewing is located at Chateau Aube 1F, 44-7 Yūhigaoka, Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. Open Tuesday to Friday 5pm – 11pm, Saturday 3pm – 11pm, and Sunday 3pm – 10pm. Closed Monday.

This story was written and edited to the sounds of Dub Trio, Pelican, and Russian Circles. All photos copyright Beer Travelist and cannot be reused. Pair with our bonus Yggdrasil Brewing coverage.