A Kawagoe produce trader that started brewing in 1996.

COEDO is the beer brand of Kyodo Shoji, a company based in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, north-west of Tokyo. The name plays on “Koedo,” or “little Edo,” a nickname for Kawagoe, Japanese Wikipedia notes. PRESIDENT Online reported in 2019 that Kyodo Shoji was founded in Kawagoe in 1982 as a small specialist trader in organic vegetables, started with a single truck by the man who was then the company’s chairman. The company says its organic farming work in Kawagoe goes back to the 1970s.

Beer grew out of the fields. COEDO says local farmers grew barley as green manure and ploughed it back into the soil, which gave the company the idea of brewing with it. A change to Japan’s liquor tax law in 1994 lowered the bar for small brewers and set off a boom in local “ji-beer.” The company says the boom soon faded, as immature brewing, high prices and unfamiliar flavours gave the category a poor image, and that COEDO was caught up in the decline. According to Japanese Wikipedia, Kyodo Shoji obtained a licence to make happoshu, a low-malt sparkling beer, in March 1996 and opened its brewery in April 1996; licences to sell beer followed in 1997.

The first signature brew used the district’s best-known crop. Its later name, Beniaka, is that of a sweet-potato variety associated with Kawagoe, Japanese Wikipedia says. The company says that after much trial and error it made a lager with sweet potatoes grown in Kawagoe, the forerunner of today’s Beniaka, and it describes that beer as the world’s first made with sweet potato. Because of the sweet potato, Japanese Wikipedia explains, Beniaka is classed as happoshu rather than beer under Japanese tax law. In 1997 the company invited Christian Mitterbauer, a fourth-generation German brewmaster, and its brewers trained under him for five years, COEDO says.

A 2006 relaunch, a new logo and beers named after colours.

The early years were hard. PRESIDENT Online reported that the beer was first sold as “Koedo Beer” during the 1990s ji-beer boom, that sales slumped as the boom faded, and that the company at one point considered leaving the beer business. The turnaround is credited to Shigeharu Asagiri, who left Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to join the family company, became vice-president in 2003 and reviewed everything from production methods to branding; he is now president, Japanese Wikipedia says.

In 2006 the beer was relaunched as COEDO, presented as a craft beer rather than a souvenir local brew, under a philosophy the company sums up as “Beer Beautiful.” PRESIDENT Online reported that the new packaging and brand logo were created with Akihiro Nishizawa of the studio EIGHT BRANDING DESIGN. Speaking at the AdverTimes DAYS conference in 2014, as reported by AdverTimes, Nishizawa described the project as moving COEDO away from the “ji-beer” image and creating a new position as a premium craft beer, with the logo and package design carrying that identity. The web magazine openers listed COEDO among Nishizawa’s notable works in 2015, describing it as a premium craft beer.

The naming system is the most visible part of the work. Each beer is named after a traditional Japanese colour: Beniaka for the red sweet-potato lager, Ruri for a pilsner, Kyara for an India pale lager and Shikkoku, “jet black,” for a black lager, alongside Shiro, a wheat beer, and Marihana, a session IPA, according to Japanese Wikipedia. PRESIDENT Online described the range as six beers carrying Japanese colour names.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Japanese craft beers: Hitachino Nest, Yo-Ho, Coedo, Echigo, Minoh, Baird and Shiga Kogen. Most of them trace back to a single change in the law. Japanese Wikipedia records that a 1994 revision of the liquor tax law cut the minimum annual output needed for a beer licence from 2,000 kilolitres to 60, and that the small regional breweries that followed, known as “ji-bīru,” at one point numbered more than 300.

Several of the seven grew out of older drinks businesses. English Wikipedia says Kiuchi Brewery, the maker of Hitachino Nest in Naka, Ibaraki, was founded in 1823 as a sake producer and began brewing beer in 1996; Shiga Kogen Beer belongs to Tamamura Honten, a Nagano sake house that dates itself to 1805 and began brewing beer in 2004. Others sit inside larger companies: Japanese Wikipedia says Yo-Ho Brewing of Karuizawa was founded in 1996 by Yoshiharu Hoshino of Hoshino Resorts and entered a business and capital alliance with Kirin Beer in 2014, that Coedo is the beer division of Kyodo Shoji of Kawagoe, and that the confectioner Bourbon has owned all of Echigo Beer of Niigata since 2010. Minoh Beer is a family brewery in Minoh, Osaka, and Zoom Japan reported in 2020 that Baird Beer was founded in Numazu in 2000 by Bryan and Sayuri Baird and moved its headquarters to Shuzenji in 2014.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels and cans have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new brewery in the countryside and a brand abroad.

COEDO began selling overseas in the United States in 2009 and added Shanghai and Australia in 2010, Japanese Wikipedia says. At home the brewing moved out of Kawagoe: in September 2016 the company relocated its brewery to Higashimatsuyama, also in Saitama. COEDO says the new brewery occupies a renovated corporate training building from the 1970s and 1980s, draws on well water, treats its wastewater on site and sends spent grain and yeast to local farms as livestock feed.

The brand has also built places to drink it. Japanese Wikipedia lists COEDO Craft Beer 1000 Labo in Kawagoe, opened in 2015, and COEDO Brewery The Restaurant, which opened in July 2020; the company says a COEDO KIOSK opened at the same time, with the aim of building a community around the brewery. AdverTimes reported in 2014 that the brewery’s own beer festival had grown into an event drawing around 7,000 people.

Japanese Wikipedia names Kyodo Shoji as the brewery’s owner, with Asagiri as president. The company’s site is coedobrewery.com; “Koedo” on its own is simply Kawagoe’s nickname and turns up in the names of many unrelated local businesses.

For a design guide, COEDO shows how a struggling souvenir beer was reset by a single idea — naming each beer after a traditional Japanese colour — carried through a new logo and packaging in 2006. Compare Hitachino Nest, the Ibaraki craft beer from a sake brewery, and Yo-Ho Brewing, the Karuizawa brewer of Yona Yona Ale. For this guide we use beniaka red, ruri blue and kyara amber with a light geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep COEDO’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.