When you're in the beer business, craft beer festivals can feel like homework. You get your glass, you work the room, you try to sound excited about haze. Fuji to Hood is not that festival.
This past weekend, our fermentation sales team attended Fuji to Hood at The Redd in Portland — an annual Japan/Oregon collaboration festival that rotates between Portland and Tokyo, bringing together craft beer, cider, sake, food, music, and more culture than most people expect to find in a single afternoon. The line for general admission wrapped around the block and stayed there all day.
Oregon Fruit's Dan Wirth enjoys a concoction from Spirit of Sage Bar
The concept is specific: when the event lands in Portland, Japanese breweries ship ingredients to their Oregon partners. The collaborating breweries then design around what arrives — specialty citrus, matcha, green tea, native flowers, Sorachi Ace hops, specialized rice, sake yeast. The ingredient is the brief.
What comes out the other side is genuinely interesting and inspired. Portland Cider and Son of The Smith Hard Cider made a cider with smoked Japanese cedar, lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Block 15 and Y Market co-fermented red rice koji with sake and lager yeast. Ruse and Namachan Brewing made a Smoke Helles with peach-smoked malt, sansho peppercorn, and yuzu. None of these are safe bets. All of them were worth talking about.
The conversations at the event had a consistent thread: both cultures share a commitment to ingredient quality and a willingness to try things that don't have an obvious precedent. That overlap is what makes the collaboration work, and why people keep coming back.
We Brought the Puree
Oregon Fruit was on the ground, too — the night before the festival, our friends at Baumans Cider hosted a happy hour at their taproom where our pineapple puree and their Authentic cider came together as a pina colada slushie. It cleared out fast. We also had the opportunity to share our mango, sweet cherry, and cranberry purees, all of which are available through Hokusei North America for brewers and cider makers working with Japanese sourcing partners.
There's a version of this story that's just about beer. But Fuji to Hood is bigger than that — sumo wrestling, taiko drums, tattoo artists, a record shop, manga, judo. Thousands of people on a Saturday afternoon in Portland for something that started with the question of what happens when Oregon and Japan make something together.
As our Fermentation Sales Manager Dan Wirth put it plainly, “it made craft beer feel fun again.” Special ingredients, unusual partnerships, and events that give people a reason to show up — that’s what keeps people engaged in this industry.
We've been growing and processing Pacific Northwest fruit since 1935. We know what it means to work with ingredients that have a story. That's the part of this industry we've always felt at home in.
