Stuck in a rut? “Touch grass,” as the kids say. Nature is never a Yawn, but sometimes it does inspire the Nature Yawns – an involuntary series of inhalation and exhalations that serve to balance… something. Could be that they’re just a thing that happens to someone I know when they go outside sometimes, but the concept is a bit of a brain worm. Mindfulness via lager is becoming a bit of a mantra, and few brewing cultures are more intentional about their products than the Japanese, whose lagers – the ne plus ultra of crisp – are the inspiration for this beer.

Adjunct lagers get a bad rap, but in truth they are an ingenious adaptation to circumstances. Using rice, corn, or whatever else is available to hand to extend barley malt in times or places of scarcity doesn’t devalue your beer, it’s a time-honored practice that requires intensive brewing practices to unlock the sugars in those adjuncts. Unfortunately, most of the time these days small-scale adjunct lagers are produced with pre-gelatinized rolled or flaked versions of rice or corn that result in heavy-handed, unsubtle beers. For this beer, we teamed up with our friends at Single Hill Brewing in Yakima, WA, to try our hand at an old-school cereal mash using actual factual rice, in the hopes of creating a composed, balanced, crisp lager beer.