Japanese Brazilian women are taking over Brazil’s craft beer industry
Japas Cervejaria co-owner Maíra Kimura compares American and Brazilian craft beers and shares how it feels to be a part of Brazil’s first women-owned brewery
Words by Andy Crump
How best to celebrate a tenth anniversary? Married folks usually opt for diamonds and daffodils; movies are given spiffy 4K updates; a college class might wax nostalgic at their alma mater, before getting smashed at the hotel. Breweries have their own traditions for turning 10, too, with one obvious norm that’s universally agreed upon: Creating a beer to mark the occasion.
Maíra Kimura, Fernanda Ueno, and Yumi Shimada, the owners and operators of Brazil’s Japas Cervejaria, recently went that direction for their brewery’s 10th anniversary, and brewed Kanpai, a grape ale. But the trio’s ambitions didn’t peak there; they aimed higher, with a slate of 10 collaboration beers, plus a recent tour along the United States’ East Coast from Oct. 7-15, with a pit stop at Snallygaster in Washington D.C., and a handful of events in New York City.
The burden of that journey fell to Kimura, who brought with her from Brazil not only the beer, but the cultures the beer represents. She, Ueno, and Shimada are Nipo Brazilians, Brazilian-born people who share Japanese heritage. Brazil is currently home to about 2 million Japanese Brazilians; that population concentrates predominantly in São Paulo (where Japas Cervejaria is based) and Paraná, in the country’s southwestern regions. Japas Cervejaria is the realization of twin heritages forged into a new, singular background, expressed through ingredients like yuzu, dekopon, wasabi, jasmine petals, and ginger—standards in both Brazilian and Japanese cooking, but uncommon in beer.
The stereotype of the pale male is, if unflattering, completely true—the craft beer space is very white, and very dude heavy, even accounting for beer’s global reach. (Fun fact: The earliest evidence that humanity loves sudsy cold ones comes from western Iran, a stark contrast to popular preconceptions of its Bavarian parentage.) Kimura, Ueno, and Shimada defy that stereotype as Japanese Brazilians and as women. (Men make up 90 percent of Brazil’s craft beer industry.) Theirs is Brazil’s first women-owned brewery, a landmark that, over the last decade, has opened up doors for women that were previously shut in the country’s local craft beer scene. Ahead of Kimura’s trip to the United States, I spoke with her about Japas Cervejaria’s influence on Brazil’s beer, the state of the country’s beer industry, and what the brewery’s Japanese Brazilian identity means to their customers—and to them.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Andy Crump: I get the impression that Brazil’s craft beer scene is fairly large, fairly popular, but also in a growing stage. It seems to me like the way that craft beer was for the U.S. maybe in the 1990s to 2000s. Is that a fair assessment? It’s a young industry in Brazil, but it’s growing quickly?
Maíra Kimura: I'd say so. We follow you guys a lot. Whatever the States are doing, we are doing. So I'm not sure if it's like the 1990s or something, but we're very much behind you guys in terms of the market itself; it's not very advanced. You have different sets of rules. The three tier system here is a complete mess. [Laughs.] Everybody can sell to anybody. So it's a bit more like a third-world country’s set of rules. But it's growing.
The main problem here is that the taxes are really high. The price of a beer is about 70 percent taxes, and it's all paid by the end consumer. So the taxes continue to accumulate. In the end, everybody pays a lot of money and it's a business for not a lot of people. Not a lot of people can buy craft beer here because it's expensive. There’s this barrier.
AC: That sounds a little bit like where the industry is going right now in the U.S., where people are turning away from craft beer toward alternatives that are healthier, but also cheaper. That's an interesting parallel. Right now, the industry is in a predicament [in the States]. What do you anticipate you’ll hear from U.S. brewers when you do your tour here?
MK: I think I'm gonna try to find out what people are brewing mostly. I've been reading a lot. I know lagers have been making a big comeback for a while now; every year is like “the year of the lager.” [Laughs.] But I think it's growing. It's really becoming something again. I mean, it was always something, but [I think it’s] a bigger trend. So I think that's it. Especially because I'm going to Snallygaster, I'm planning to see what people are bringing there and pouring there. I'm really excited to see what's new. But I've heard the [American industry] is not in the best shape right now.
AC: Yeah. We're making our way through it as best we can. That “year of the lager” thing is funny. I’ve been hearing that every year for the last few years, too. I'm curious what the trends are in Brazil, and what major fads craft brewers are following there.
MK: I think we've been through a phase of hazy IPAs. We're still there. I think it's not that trendy anymore, and it's not as high anymore, but it's still there. But here, people are doing a lot of lagers. The problem again is that craft lagers are much more expensive than the mass produced lagers, so why would people buy craft lagers, you know? Is it 20 times better than a mass produced lager? I don't know.
AC: That’s the key, isn't it? To be able to convince the consumer that you have the better thing? That’s also tough because yes, I'm sure you have better beer [than macro breweries], but how do you sell “better” when money is an object?
MK: There's no easy strategy for that. We try to decrease the maximum (price) that we can so that it’s more accessible, but there is no magic formula where we can suddenly have a good product with good quality at a good price. We’re very strong in marketing. We try to invest in it, in trying to present the product in a beautiful way, and our cans all have an explanation of what to expect from each beer. We try to make it clear that people are making a good decision by choosing us. [Laughs.]
AC: That kind of education is increasingly important here, too. Obviously, money is an obstacle, cost is an obstacle, and there's no easy way around that, but what do you hear from customers who do choose your beer? To your understanding, what gets people through the door for you?
MK: I think a lot of people identify with us. A lot of our customers are half Japanese, as well, and we have a lot of women that are consumers too. I think we have mostly women that follow us on Instagram. It's like 40-60 percent. In breweries, it’s usually like 80 percent men following. I know that I had a brewery before and it was something like that, and with another that I sold, too. So I think people identify with us. But not only that, like you said, education is something that we invest in a lot. We talk about our history, we talk about ourselves, we talk about what inspires us. So I think that’s something that people are interested in.
Our brewery has three faces, too. I think people like to see us. They want to support women-owned businesses. And of course, I like to believe that people like the beer too! [Laughs.]
AC: If the beer wasn't good, they probably wouldn't keep coming back! In the U.S. too, people want to see themselves in the products and brands they buy. So the identity component is important for Japas Cervejaria. Is that true elsewhere in Brazilian culture?
MK: I think so. For our kind of consumers, people who look for small business products, I think they really care about who's making it. The brand has to have a soul, so it’s not just like any brand that’s mass produced. Nobody knows who's behind that. People like to follow us. Here in Brazil, especially before the pandemic, we did a lot of little events, and we always had a lot of people who would go to them.
AC: I’m curious about what you all are brewing, too. I know you're doing some collaborations when you come up the East Coast this month. What projects do you have planned while you're here?
MK: I’m going to participate in events. We were going to do a collaboration, but it was canceled because Torch & Crown’s [in New York’s Union Square] production stopped. They closed the production. So we were doing a collab with them, but not anymore. But we did a few there. We did one with WeldWerks, from Colorado. We did it here and there at the same time. Theirs will be ready a little bit before ours; it (was) released in the party here (on) Oct. 19.
We’re going to do 10 collabs total. Some of them are already made; some of them are yet to be done.
AC: Collabs are one of the key ways names are built in the industry. What do you feel like you learn each time you do collaboration beers, and what experiences do you take back with you to the brewery?
MK: I think it's very interesting, because every brewery has its own way to collaborate with other breweries. So I’ve learned about how to communicate with people, actually, because sometimes it's hard to make things meet—the ideas stuff like that. But I’ve learned a lot of techniques, too. Sometimes you don't know how people do dry hopping differently than you, and then you ask, “Why do you do this this way?” And then you learn why.
So I always learn something new from each collab, which is great. We like to do different things. When the hazy IPA craze was going on, I was like, “Oh my god, another hazy IPA. What am I going to do differently now?” [Laughs.] You change the hops, you change proportions, something like that, but there aren’t a lot of variations you can do. You can see that I’m over it!
AC: What do you look to do to keep brewing exciting and inventive so that you're not boring yourselves making hazy IPAs over and over again? That’s what the market demands, but it’s also not very fulfilling.
MK: Exactly. I like researching new hops and combinations of hops, and trying to find ways to make them a little bit different. We also use a lot of Japanese and Brazilian ingredients, so, for example, we can bring another layer of fruitiness that comes from the fruit in the beer sometimes. We did one a while ago with cacao—not the nibs, but the goo around the nibs, a white goo [cocoa mucilage] that tastes fresh and juicy. It goes well in a hazy IPA. [The finished beer] was really interesting, really tropical and different. So yeah, I like to play with ingredients so that it doesn’t get boring!
AC: Those ingredients might be more familiar to your local consumers, but they're still not commonly used in beer, so do they help your beer stand out to those customers?
MK: Yeah, I think so. People still get surprised by these kinds of flavors [in beers]. And some people are copying us, too, here in Brazil. I’ve seen two breweries that have Japanese inspiration, too, and another guy that's trendy here, he uses yuzu and he's got nothing to do with Japanese culture. So I think people get interested in these ingredients, and try to use them, too. They do make us stand out, though of course we didn't invent yuzu or anything like that. [Laughs.] But we were the first ones to use it in Brazil. We’d never heard of anybody putting it into beer before, and it used to be really hard to actually buy yuzu.
It’s something that we’re trying not to make into an obligation anymore. Back when we started, we felt like we needed to use something different, like we had to come up with yuzu, or another fruit to add. Nowadays, we can play more with concepts and culture. Some of our beers don't have any [adjuncts] added, but we still have that reputation for brewing with unique ingredients.
AC: For me, this raises the question of how you feel Japas Cervejaria has changed, and how the brewery has changed craft beer as a whole in Brazil, over the last 10 years? You guys were doing this in an early phase of Brazil's craft beer movement. I’m curious how you, Fernanda, and Yumi have changed, and how Brazilian beer has changed, too.
MK: I think a lot of things have changed. We were the first Brazilian brewery that had only women [brewers and owners]. Now, there are a few other breweries that are all women owned, but we were the first one. It wasn’t that common 10 years ago to work with beer; there were no women selling beer. Of course, I'm getting into this bias of gender, because it's something important to me, but I like to think that we inspired some people to start working with beer, to say, “Oh, if these girls are there, I can be there too. I can work with beer.” It's important to represent women in a space where it doesn’t matter if you're a woman, or a man, to be honest. It's important to have representation and inclusivity, I think.
We’ve evolved a lot as a market, as an industry here, too. It was very “no rules” in the beginning. Now, it’s a little bit better. We changed a lot. We used to import a lot of beer. I used to import and sell beer in Brazil. We can't do that anymore because the prices are super high. There was a phase where a lot of imported beers were here, so we kind of knew what people were doing in the States, and in Europe, but it didn't help grow our own industry. From the moment that these products became too expensive for us to buy, we started to brew more, so increases in prices and the economy changed a lot, too. We used to have a good exchange rate with the dollar; now it's very expensive to buy a dollar.
Published on October 25, 2024
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.