Baladin Xyauyù Kioke: Italian Beer Aged in Soy Sauce Barrels

Italian beer aged in Japanese soy sauce barrels sounds like a marketing exercise. It is not, and the reason it is not is worth explaining, because it turns on something most people do not know about how soy sauce gets made.

What a Kioke Actually Is

A kioke is a large wooden vat, cedar, bound with bamboo, that Japan has used to ferment soy sauce and miso for centuries.

The important part is that the vat is not a container. Fermentation microorganisms live in the wood itself, colony after colony, for decades. A working kioke is closer to a sourdough starter the size of a room than to a barrel. That is why the good soy sauce houses guard theirs.

They have also nearly vanished. Almost all soy sauce today is fermented in steel or plastic, faster and more controlled. Only a handful of makers still use kioke at all, and Yamaroku Shoyu on the island of Shodoshima is one of the few who not only use them but have taken up building them again, because the craftsmen who made them were dying out.

That is the collaboration. Baladin, the Italian brewery Teo Musso founded in 1996, aging beer in Yamaroku's cedar.

Why It Pours Flat

Xyauyù is Baladin's oxidative series. The beer is aged in deliberate contact with air, which is the opposite of how beer is normally protected, and it is the same principle behind sherry and tawny port.

So: no carbonation, none at all. Full body. Natural sweetness that builds with age rather than fading.

If you are expecting an IPA experience, this will read as a mistake. It is not one.

What It Tastes Like

Dried fig, raisin, caramel and toasted wood on the nose. Rich malt, dark fruit and brown sugar on the palate, with the cedar sitting underneath rather than on top. The finish is long, warm and slightly oxidative.

It lands in dessert wine territory without going soft in the middle.

How to Drink It

Small pours, lightly chilled or at cellar temperature, and then leave it for a few minutes. It changes noticeably in the glass as it warms. Treat it the way you would a port.

What to Eat With It

Our brown butter miso ramen, skirt steak yakitori, anything rich and savoury. It also works as a dessert pour on its own, which is not something we say about many beers.

Ask about it if you want to try something that argues with its own category.