Taisuke Sato: Brewing the Finest Sake from Two Types of Chaos

2021/07/21

haccoba -Craft Sake Brewery- produces sake based on a free brewing style similar to craft beer. Strictly speaking, it is not classified as "Nihonshu" (refined sake), but rather falls under the category of "Other Brewed Liquors."

To begin with, a license is required to produce alcohol in Japan. Furthermore, it is currently impossible for new players to obtain a license to produce Nihonshu.

Therefore, there are two main ways to start a sake brewery in Japan. One is to take over an existing brewery through business succession. The other is to do what we do: "utilize a license other than for Nihonshu to produce alcohol using Nihonshu production methods."

The category of "Other Brewed Liquors" possesses a literal chaos that cannot be categorized into specific types of alcohol.

While maintaining the traditional Japanese brewing method using rice and koji, we add fruits and herbs during the fermentation process to enjoy differences in flavor and aroma. This raises the question, "Is that even sake?" but I actually believe it brings us closer to the origins of Japanese fermentation culture. In the past, when licenses were not required for brewing, households in Japan enjoyed making alcohol by freely using ingredients other than just rice and koji. By pursuing the fermentation culture of that free era, we are chasing the romance of reaching the ultimate flavor.

The other chaos is the location of our brewery: Odaka District, Minamisoma City, Fukushima Prefecture. This is a town where the population temporarily dropped to zero due to evacuations following the nuclear accident caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake ten years ago.

In a town where life was not lived for several years, daily life and culture were reset. Now, the local residents are in the stage of carefully restarting their lives step by step.

A "town that became zero" is a chaotic situation, but from another perspective, it is a modern frontier where "we can pioneer the kind of town we want to live in."

In such a town, we are taking on the challenge of starting a sake brewery from scratch—an institution that has shaped Japanese culture and aesthetic sense.

I believe that sharing "supremely delicious sake" with a free brewing style from this land will serve as a catalyst for people around the world to feel closer to "fermentation culture" and "climate change and energy issues."