For as long as sake as been imported and brewed here in the U.S., its technical aspects—the rice variety, polishing rate, water source, yeast type, fermentation method and more—remain difficult for many American drinkers to grasp. Sake has an accessibility problem in the U.S., and one saké bar in Los Angeles thinks it has found the antidote. Their menu avoids much traditional terminology in favor of more tangible descriptions. It compares one bottle to grapefruit-flavored sparkling water and another to watermelon Skittles. “We want to make sake fun, and not intimidating or scary, because I think sometimes it can be a little stressful [to order],” their beverage director says.
This approach is part of a broader movement to demystify sake for Americans. Getting guests to order an unfamiliar bottle of sake advances her ultimate goal—showing off just how dynamic and versatile the drink can be. But for Japanese brewers, it’s a potential solve for an existential problem. Sake sales in Japan have fallen every year since 1975. Younger Japanese drinkers tend to prefer wine, beer and cocktails. Exports mean survival.
“I’m seeing so much interest in what’s happening in the U.S. market from the Japanese brewing community,” she says, who won a 2023 James Beard Foundation Award for her saké bar's beverage program.
This hunt for new sake drinkers, in Japan and abroad, also coincides with an uptick in American sake breweries and a new generation of sake makers embracing boundary-pushing styles. Collectively, the efforts seem to be working. “I’ve heard so many times that now is going to be sake’s moment, but it has never really come to fruition,” she says. “But it does feel like [now] there’s momentum in a different way than there has been in the United States.”
The French Connection
It helps that sake producers are turning to production styles that draw inspiration from a category with which many Americans are already familiar—French winemaking. Like many American wine drinkers, sake brewers have long revered French winemakers, particularly those in Champagne and Burgundy.
Many operations source the prized short-grain rice Yamada Nishiki from grand cru-style rice fields and experiment with brewing styles that mimic the traditional method. These include a brewery, in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture, whose sakes are an explicit reference to Burgundy. Rather than listing standard technical details on labels, it shares information on terroir-informing soil types and microclimates. The brewery also owns a winery in Burgundy. Meanwhile, a toji (head brewer) for a historic sake producer in Yamagata Prefecture, studied winemaking in Burgundy. He uses his French training to create a Burgundian-style Junmai Daiginjo sake, which is described as mineral-driven and precise.
The admiration between sake and wine producers goes both ways. Although production methods are drastically different, winemakers are finding inspiration in the dedication and attention to detail required to make sake. One Champagne house's chef de cave visited Japan more than 20 times. “I fell in love with Japanese culture and also with their drink,” he says. “Sake was such a discovery for me.”
Nearing retirement, he decided to take up a new challenge and join a sake brewery as master blender and chief collaborator. As he would for a wine, he combines batches to find the precise balance of minerality, floral character, fruit, alcohol and silkiness that defines the house's style. “The most validating part is when the toji participates in the assemblage, when they’re inspired by the exercise and suggest adjustments,” he shares, who has worked with tojis at many noted sake outfits.
Japanese breweries have practiced blending since at least the Edo era, but not as openly or as explicitly as some brands.
“(Our sake) is a wine-like experience with sake DNA,” says the brand’s former chief operating officer. “It’s the fact that Japanese brewers have a respect for Champagne and for our master blender that allowed us to get started. Now, with our success in the U.S. and in fine dining, [our brewer collaborators] see the ability to open new doors.”
Young Brewers Embrace Craft Sake
The movement back toward artisanal production, driven by a younger generation of Japanese brewers, has also been a major boon to the nation’s sake industry and products’ appeal overseas.
When one man took over his family’s brewery in the Wakayama prefecture 20 years ago, he steered production away from the mass-produced sake of his father’s generation and back to hand-crafted sake. He also established year-round brewing, which attracted top graduates from the elite Tokyo University of Agriculture.
Now, the average age of his brewery workers is 32. “When you’re drinking our sake, you can feel their energy,” says the owner, who won the International Wine Challenge Brewer of the Year in 2019 and 2020. “I love working with [younger brewers] because they always come up with new ideas, new recipes, new products.”
He grows a portion of the brewery's rice. His team experiments with yeast strains and produces doburoku, a creamy, unfiltered, low-alcohol form of sake once banned in Japan. We are "really the vanguard of sake now,” saysthe beverage director of one Japanese restaurant group in New York City, who sells a case of the Junmai Sake each week. This brewery and other operations like it represent a reversal of post-WWII industrial sake making. Their sakes also mark a clear departure from super-premium ginjo and daiginjo style sakes, whose brewers chased lower and lower rice polishing rates.
There is a lot of innovation now, including barrel aging, isolating yeast from wildflowers, a revival of heirloom rice varieties and more frizzante, Pét-Nat-like sakes. Many breweries are trying to create products that will appeal to a younger audience that perhaps has a different palate than their parents did.
Limited Licenses Disperse Brewers
Still, as exciting as new-school sake is, in Japan there’s a limit to who can make it. Since the beginning of sake’s descent in the 1970s, the Japanese National Tax office has declined to issue new brewery licenses, with the relatively new exception of export-only breweries. Essentially, to own a sake brewery in Japan means buying someone out or inheriting one—or leaving the country entirely.
“It’s kind of anti-constitutional,” says the founder of a brewery in Holbrook, Arizona. “Japanese people have a right to start their own business, but the business of sake is regulated by the establishment.”
After a decade working in sake production, he knew that the Japanese system, where even homebrewing is illegal, would block him from opening a brewery. In 2015, he finally settled in his wife’s hometown in Arizona, where started his business. To his surprise, the bone-dry climate prevented microbial contamination that so many brewers fight in humid Japan, and local water combined with American-grown rice yielded award-winning sake.
“It’s still small production and all handmade,” he says. “I’m working year-round to catch up with the demand.”
The Arizona brewer isn’t alone in his success with crafting sake outside of Japan. Two industry veterans in Japan, opened a brewery in Honolulu in 2020 and quickly filled a niche for locally brewed sake. Plenty of others have followed across the U.S.
The Rise of American Makers
Sitting down in the original tasting room of a Brooklyn-based sake brewery would feel familiar to any craft beer devotee. Just above a set of taps, a window into the brewery frames a set of stainless-steel fermentation tanks. But this brewery's medium is rice, rather than barley. In the koji room, the co-owner and toji propagates the mold responsible for converting rice’s starch into sugar, which yeast then gobble up to make alcohol. Opening up those fermentation tanks releases a burst of tropical fruit aroma, a hallmark of koji fermentation.
Although large-scale sake breweries have been around in California since the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, most are subsidiaries of Japanese companies. In contrast, these three breweries belong to a cohort of roughly two dozen independent craft sake breweries in the U.S. that are carving out a new niche for American drinkers.
These new-school, American craft brewers understand that to survive, they must educate these consumers. “The challenge that affects every corner of the sake industry is low consumer knowledge,” says Weston Konishi, president of the Sake Brewers Association of North America. “Related to that is creating a viable business, where supply meets demand. That’s been tricky for lots of our producers, but I’m pleased to say that most of them are working that equation out.”
Pushing the Category Forward
Another path toward better marketabilty is labeling. On opening night of a seafood restaurant in Houston, the wine director poured two sakes, both of which boast whimsical and aesthetically-pleasing labels with English-language branding. One was an umami-rich Junmai Ginjo, which depicts a cluster of wild mushrooms on its label. The second was Junmai Sparkling Sake, which features on its aqua-hued label a swimming octopus, fish and other marine life.
This is a departure from many traditional sake labels, which are frequently devoid of imagery and contain only Japanese text. “Faced with highly stylized, impenetrable kanji characters crawling across a label like ancient runes, would-be fans might, the argument goes, just give up on trying to get to know sake better,” tellingly wrote journalist Nancy Matsumoto in a Medium post in 2019.
The success of labels with Western appeal, often targeted for export, is especially apparent with a Junmai from a brewery in Kochi, which displays a blue whale swimming on its label. It’s been a major success. Sales for the brewery have skyrocketed since the bottling was introduced, up more than 200 million yen (around $1.35 million USD) in 2021 compared to just 20 million yen in 2013. These sakes are well-suited to retail and are a helpful tool in the fight to win over Western drinkers.
Japanese producers have a long, continuous history of experimentation. “ut they innovate within a certain set of parameters that [North American] brewers don’t recognize or acknowledge.
In Japan, seishu or nihonshu, the legal names for sake, can only be brewed with water, rice, koji and yeast. But in America, no such restrictions apply. And with few preconceived notions of what sake should be, there’s room for all styles: modern, fruity flavor bombs and old-school offerings, force-carbonated cans and traditional-method bubbles. Sakes brewed in Nashville or back in Japan. For the first time in history, it’s all in America, waiting to be consumed.
“Sake is a world-class product that’s still relatively undiscovered in the American market,” says Weston Konishi. “It hasn’t had its breakthrough moment yet. But we’re building momentum.”
