Fortunately, I felt much better today. It was also a beautiful day with 0% chance of rain according to the liars at weather.com (it rained in the evening) so I decided it was time to visit Shonan Brewing. The head brewer, Tsutsui-san, has visited Portland a couple of times and last month he came to do a collaboration with Culmination Brewing. We’ve been out drinking several times and he took a couple of hours out of his schedule to show me around.

But I started the day out at Hoshino Coffee again, this time getting the Egg Slut. I had it a couple of times last year and it’s tasty.

It takes about an hour and a half on several trains to make it to Kagawa Station in Chigasaki where Shonan Beer is located. I couldn’t find Shonan Brewing on Google maps because it’s really a part of Kumazawa Brewing, a sake maker who has a beer sideline. Lots of craft beer in Japan is made by traditional sake brewers who are branching out. Kagawa station is in the middle of nowhere and the first thing I noticed is all of the old ladies descending upon a restaurant that serves Italian food.

I heard the restaurant was recently on NHK-TV, adding to the popularity. The owner of the brewery has an art shop and three restaurants on the property and I heard he also has plans to add an onsen and a ryokan.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures of the brewery, but I did see some tanks from Canby and Portland Kettle Works.

Tsutsui-san even showed me where they store some of the sake for aging, which is a WWII-era underground bunker.

I also had a burger at the less crowded restaurant. Being a Portlander, I had coffee and beer.

I was planning on taking a different route back, through Chigasaki, but JR was having issues all day and I had to take Odakyu both out and back. While it made the ride a little repetitive, it was the cheapest alternative on Google maps and only cost ~¥800 each way

Later I went out to dinner with my old co-worker Suzuki-san and that just meant more beer.

We called it a night early because I’m still a bit jet-lagged and Suzuki-san has a weird schedule and hasn’t worked since he was laid off several years ago. Currently he goes to bed at 3PM and gets up around 10PM. We were both up “late”.

And now I’ve been fighting with putting up this post (and the slowness of uploading pictures) and it’s later than I thought. Time to really call it a night!