Hello and happy Friday! We’re writing to you from Rochester, NY and will be sure to hit a few local breweries this weekend. Hit reply with where you’ll be stopping in!

In this week’s issue:

Alright y’all, get your Japanese geography ready! 100 points to anyone who can point to Mushima on a map. We’ll understand if you can’t. This tiny island in western Japan has a whopping 40 residents. When you step off the boat, a hand-painted sign reads “Welcome home” and a few cats wander over to walk you in.

Years ago, a young man named Ryuhei Iseki stepped onto that same dock feeling lost. He had grown up in Osaka and taken a sales job that ran him down. His great-grandfather once had a house on Mushima, so the island had always felt like a slower, softer place to him.

He came back one day to find the port almost empty. As he wandered the shore, a group of islanders waved him over to a fire they had going in a metal drum. They asked whose kid he was. He gave his grandmother’s name, and they smiled, told him “Welcome home,” and pulled a cold beer from an old refrigerator to put in his hand.

That one cold beer reached something deep in him. It was the moment he understood he would rather build a life somewhere with that kind of warmth than keep grinding away in a city that offered none.

So he moved to Mushima. He knew he was an outsider, and he says he arrived thinking of himself as an “invader”. Someone the locals never asked for. But he drank with them, worked alongside them, and slowly earned his place.

Then he learned that barley fields used to cover the slope beneath the lighthouse, and something clicked. He taught himself to brew, grew his own two-row barley, renovated an old house near the port, and in 2019 opened Mushimahama Brewery.

Over time, his beer started pulling the wider world back toward this tiny island. People began making the trip out just to taste it. A few times a year he even loads up and pours at a market on the mainland, carrying Mushima’s name farther than it has traveled in decades. The islanders, who worry most about there being no work to keep young people around, cheer him on with their whole hearts.

That is the quiet magic of a good beer. It can reach into the biggest cities and the smallest islands alike, and it can turn a stranger by a fire into someone who belongs. Beer connects people in every corner of the world, even the corners with only 40 people and a lighthouse.

So, next time you are at a small local brewery: ask the person who made your beer how they ended up there. Some of the best stories in the world are waiting on the other side of the bar 😉