When beer shortage hit sushi restaurants, this Sacramento brewer stepped up with Japanese ales

In summer 2020, North American Food Distribution Co. had a problem.

Supply chain snafus throttled Asian production, and the West Sacramento-based Japanese import company was unable to get beer from longtime brewery partners like Echigo and Kizakura. Though people weren’t going out to restaurants, demand persisted for the Japanese ales.

That dilemma looked like a business opportunity.

After all, West Sacramento has been a shipping hub since the Port of Sacramento was established in 1963, and it gained a new identity as a craft brewing hotspot in the early 2010s. When West Sacramento couldn’t bring Japanese beer to the region, why not make Japanese-inspired craft beer locally?

Thus began Onibi Beer Co., owned by North American Food Distribution Co. and made by Jackrabbit Brewing less than three miles away. It’s the Sacramento region’s first brewery making beers with the intention of pairing them with Japanese food.

“The beers we come up with, a lot of it is through foods that we love. We figure we love this food, what kind of beer can we make to go with it?” said North American Food Distribution Co. director of sales and marketing Kenichiro Hirsch.

Less than two years after the first matcha cream stout was released, Onibi beers now are carried in 18 Sacramento-area restaurants and nearly 80 throughout California, all of which are listed on the brewery’s website. You can find them at grocery stores such as 99 Ranch, Corti Bros., Oto’s Marketplace and KP International Market, with more to come this year.

Because Onibi’s parent company already has the infrastructure for statewide distribution, its beer is now sold in more than 60 markets and liquor stores statewide. That contrasts with most Sacramento-area craft breweries, which have historically functioned as neighborhood taprooms with a moderate reach beyond local shelves.

Onibi beers total 11 — including a yuzu white ale, a ginger-heavy honey blonde, a lychee-raspberry sour — in addition to a bottled line called Banzai Beer. Designed as a local craft competitor to Asahi or Sapporo, Banzai is a “sake bomb beer,” as North American Food Distribution Co. design and marketing guru Jared Wong described the rice lager.

The others blend Japanese ingredients with modern U.S. styles, such as Onibi’s shiso hazy IPA. It’s your typical New England-style bitter beer, Jackrabbit co-owner and operator Erle Mankin said, but made with 1,500 mashed shiso leaves per tank.

North American Food Distribution Co. higher-ups like Wong, Hirsch and assistant vice president Takahiro Tokura will come to Mankin with ideas for beer. He’ll then make a base sampler for tasting and approval before adding the specialty Japanese ingredients.

“The base is California craft, but the ingredients we put in, you’re always going to see a different take on something,” Mankin said.

Special release at Binchoyaki

Jackrabbit partnered with Binchoyaki, the celebrated Southside Park izakaya, on a limited-release beer four years ago. It’s fitting, then, that Binchoyaki was the first restaurant to get its own Onibi beer, a 7% sweet potato amber ale.

Made with sweet potatoes from Merced County-based Yagi Brothers Produce, it’s called Takehara Tanuki. That’s a reference to Binchoyaki’s chef Craig Takehara and the adorable yet mischevious “Japanese raccoon dog.” Wong designs all Onibi cans with a central face looking out at the drinker; this one bears a devilishly smirking racoon against a purple backdrop.

Many craft beers can overpower Japanese food, stripping customer’s ability to taste delicate sushi or umami-rich ramen broth. Finding the right balance can be difficult, said Toki Sawada of Binchoyaki.

“Our food can be on the heavier side, you know. It’s barbecue, it’s sumiyaki, it’s tare sauce,” Sawada said. “It needs a beer that takes that bolder flavor and doesn’t wash away our food, but yet the beer itself has (to have) a unique flavor that stands through.”

Onibi’s California black lager, released in March, tastes somewhere between a stout and lighter, more typical lager. It’s meant for hot summer days by the barbecue, or to give some body to garlicky ramen or sauce-drizzled sushi.

“(We) were always trying to make sure that we didn’t make beers that if you drink it, your taste buds are just shot. You want to have it with food,” Wong said.

Japanese food is California food

Sacramento’s craft brewing scene is overwhelmingly white, as is the case in many cities across the country. Yet a couple other Asian American-owned breweries are in business in Sacramento, and similarly try to make beer that tastes good on its own or with traditional dishes.

King Cong Brewing founder Cong Nguyen’s Vietnamese American parents own Long Sandwich in South Sacramento, and Nguyen sometimes sells their bánh mì at his Del Paso Boulevard brewpub. Isleton-based Asian Brothers Brewing separates its beer by country or ethnic group — want yours to pair with Chinese, Hmong or Thai food?

But Onibi is the first in the region to make Japanese-inspired beer, despite the Japanese community’s deep roots in Sacramento. More than 7,000 Japanese Americans lived in Sacramento prior to World War II, though only 59% returned to Sacramento County from internment camps after the war.

“They’re really opening up a market. They’re tapping a market that’s reasonably untapped, the Japanese American market for craft (beer),” Mankin said. “(People will) have entered into the craft space through Onibi, and that’s an amazing thing. The whole industry will have growth because of that.”

When Hirsch moved from Tokyo to Sacramento in 1995 at 11 years old, he only knew of a handful of local Japanese restaurants, one of which employed his mother.

But Japanese food has become ever-more popular and ubiquitous throughout the United States in the years since, aided by a growing awareness and preference for fresh ingredients. Now Japanese restaurants are “almost on every corner,” Hirsch said.

“Back then ... Japanese food was kind of a foreign food. Now a lot of the locals treat it like a local California food, which is amazing to see. I really love that,” Hirsch said.

This story was originally published May 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.