There are a gazillion reasons to visit Tokyo, but one is to sit down at Craftrock’s brewpub in Nihombashi, talk brewing with Ryo Suzuki, and taste some really fun beers.
Suzuki loves flavor and music, and Craftrock matches each beer with a recommended tune—an old-school American IPA, for example, goes with “Wide Awake” by Parquet Courts. As we chat, Suzuki delivers a glass of bright straw-gold beer; it’s a freshly packaged batch of the brewery’s Sansho Lager, which won gold at the 2026 World Beer Cup.
Being somewhat familiar with sansho, I expect a numbing spice kick and some subtle, zesty citrus. Instead, the tingling sensation is faint—only there if I really hunt for it—but the glass is kicking off a beautifully pronounced aroma of sweet orange peels. (The beer’s song pairing: Sublime’s “Santeria.”)
Those bright orange notes aren’t really coming from the hops. Suzuki and his team hop the lager with Saaz and Motueka, but he estimates that 70 to 80 percent of that aroma is coming from a tiny amount of sansho.
“It’s kind of the same as hops,” he says. “Better-quality hops have more aroma. Same with sansho. Less quality, you’ve got to use a lot. Better quality, you don’t really need to use a lot.”
Sansho Sorcery
What does it take to win a gold medal at the World Beer Cup? There are many possible answers—we might say a clean profile, evident and enticing aroma, pleasing and balanced flavors, freshness, airtight packaging, resilient foam, and so on.
But have you tried adding sansho pepper?
There might be something to it. At the past two World Beer Cups, in 2025 and 2026, beers made with sansho won gold in the Herb and Spice Beer category. Both came from Japanese breweries—last year’s winner was the Sansho Gose from Open Air Brewing in Kobe; this year, it was Craftrock’s Sansho Lager.
Both beers were excellent, obviously, or they wouldn’t have won gold. But we can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a little bit of magic in that sansho.
Anyone who enjoys Japanese food is probably familiar with sansho. In many Japanese restaurants, it’s right there on the table in dried form, ready to sprinkle on your yakitori or ramen—though its classic companion is unagi, grilled eel, where that zesty tingle adds tangy balance to the sweet-savory fat.
Other forms of sansho make their way into Japanese cooking, including the leaves and whole berries (or peppercorns); each form provides a somewhat different character. Generally, though, the hallmark sansho flavor is a subtle tingling combined with a fruity, citrus-like quality. Fresh sansho has an aroma more like lemon or lime than any pepper we know, and its taste is certainly zesty.
Those flavors make sense when we consider the plant’s makeup. Sansho’s Latin name is Zanthoxylum piperitum, the same genus as numbing Sichuan pepper—and the flavor is similar, but sansho has a brighter, fruitier aroma. Notably, that genus isn’t related to black pepper or to chile peppers, but it’s in the same family—Rutaceae—as citrus fruit.
Brewers who know their hop compounds will be familiar with some of the terpenes found in sansho: linalool, geraniol, citronellal, and limonene, among others. That tingling sensation, meanwhile, comes from a compound called hydroxy-alpha-sanshool—which is named, of course, for sansho.
However, that tingling sensation isn’t really what these award-winning brewers are trying to capture in their sansho beers.
Brewing with Sansho
Ben Emrich, head brewer at Kobe’s Open Air as well as his own Nomodachi brand, shares an anecdote that conveys sansho’s appeal—and a potential pitfall.
“Budo sansho is so orange-flavored that in one competition, one of my beers got dinged in the herbal category because the judges said they couldn’t taste the herb,” he says. “The orange flavor was overwhelming—and all of that orange flavor came from the sansho.”
There are a few types of sansho, and each has a somewhat different character. The most common is Asakura sansho, which is citrusy but also has more herbal flavor than other types. “I think it fits lagers a lot better,” Emrich says, “because it has a green, herbal, almost Noble hop character that plays really well with lager hops.”
Then there’s budo sansho—budo means grape, and the berries look like little green grapes. It’s the most orange-forward type, and it works well with IPAs, Emrich says. “I’ve found that if you go too bitter or too dry with it, it’s a really not-great combo.” That’s the type he used in the gold medal–winning Sansho Gose, which further embraces Japanese flavors via koji rice.
Finally, there’s Arima sansho, named for the famous spa town where it grows. It’s beautifully lemon-forward, Emrich says, but also hard to find—unless you go to Arima.
Both Suzuki and Emrich use sansho in its dried, powdered form. They’re looking for freshness and quality—and especially that bright citrus aroma. Both brewers say they don’t want much of that tingling sensation in their beers. “Because numbing character is hard to drink a lot,” Suzuki says. Higher-quality sansho is “more citrus, less numbing.” He’s looking for the smallest amount but highest aroma efficiency.
You can also brew with the green, whole berries, but they come with a harsher taste—Emrich describes it as a “dirty flavor.” Suzuki compares the quality powdered forms, meanwhile, to Cryo hops: They concentrate the better aromatic parts while leaving out the vegetal matter.
For the Sansho Lager, Suzuki adds it at both whirlpool and dry hop. You don’t need much: For 15 barrels at Craftrock’s brewpub, Suzuki adds 100 grams at whirlpool and 300 grams at dry hop—or roughly one and three grams, respectively, for a five-gallon batch.
“It has a really strong flavor,” Suzuki says. “You know, we brewed that beer at the [start] of November, and World Beer Cup was at the end of April. Almost half a year, six months. It still remains really strong in flavor. ... It’s long-lasting. Sansho is maybe better than hops for the consistency.”
Emrich adds more—about 0.9 grams per liter for most beers, all on the cold side; for lighter styles, including the gose, he’ll reduce that to 0.6 to 0.75 grams. If you’re adding the sansho in a mesh bag for a couple days before removing it—for example, in a corny keg—he recommends going up to 1 gram per liter. But every tenth of a gram makes a difference.
While Suzuki and other brewers like to add a bit of sansho to the whirlpool—its terpenes are susceptible to biotransformation—Emrich says he now prefers to keep it on the cold side. “Every time I’ve used it on the hot side, it loses a lot of those delicate flavors,” he says. “We always dry hop with it—we leave it in for one or two days and at colder temps. We’ve gone three or four days, but after that it starts to get a little too herbal for me, and I want to pull the most citrus out of it that I can.”
Sansho’s citrus-promoting power also raises the possibility that it could be a valuable supporting player. “I don’t think you really need to use sansho as a main character,” Suzuki says. “It can be a main, [or] you can also make a layer.” In that way, it can boost other citrus flavors—whether from actual citrus or from hops. The flavor is slightly different from hops, he says, but it adds another layer of complexity where those citrus flavors connect.
And the potential for sansho as an ingredient goes well beyond lager and gose. Many beer styles welcome citrus flavors, and sansho could work in any of them. One of Suzuki’s favorites is an American-style amber ale—or even an old-school IPA—with a bit of caramel malt. With that, he highly recommends drinking the beer with okonomiyaki, the savory Japanese pancakes. “My favorite pairing,” he says.
One of Emrich’s favorites was a chocolate porter that they keg-dosed with sansho. “I wouldn’t do a full-size batch of the porter because it would take too long to sell,” he says, “but it was a really interesting Christmasy beer with a nice chocolate-herbal flavor. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it reminded me of being a kid at Christmas with the tree and the herbal, citrusy smell—the Christmas chocolates, orange with cloves stuck in it—all those flavors combine into this crazy, Christmasy, wintery feeling.”
That touch of magic can be hard to describe, and it comes from more than the citrus aromas.
“Fun fact: The tingle that you feel with sansho is the same in your brain as when you get an electric shock,” Emrich says. “The thing sansho does to your nerves creates waves, and your brain reads those signals the same way it reads the signals from electricity.”
It’s a potent spark, and both Suzuki and Emrich urge caution in the quantities—a little goes a long way, while a lot can create enemies.
“I actually hated sansho for years after I moved here because of the second beer festival I went to in Japan,” Emrich says. It was in Kyoto, and a brewery there put way too much sansho in a beer. “It was so incredibly strong that I took one sip and my mouth went immediately numb. It was too overpowering. This stuff needs balance. So even if you really like it, don’t overdo it. People will hate you if you do.”
