Combining the Best of Traditional and Modern Sake Brewing

While sake purists say there are only four ingredients used to make sake: rice, koji (rice fungus), yeast, and water, there are countless ways these four ingredients can interact during the brewing process, altering the flavors of the final product. While it's easy to divide sake production camps into traditionalists and innovators, there are also brewers like Gunma’s Tsuchida Sake Brewery who are combining both tradition and innovation. Today’s sake brewing is about speed and consistency; most breweries use the same ingredients and processes to produce their products, perhaps changing one variable at a time when they wish to make a slight change to flavor or alcohol content. But this approach has reduced the art of sake brewing to a science and created a sake marketplace where the differences between brands is subtle.

Returning to the old ways is a costly endeavor; it takes Tsuchida twice as long to produce sake compared to the modern methods, and monitoring the sake to ensure it produces a complex flavor is labor intensive. But Tsuchida believes in their methods, which sustain biodiversity in microorganisms and create sake whose flavors cannot be replicated by other brewers, or even perfectly repeated by Tsuchida. Visitors to the brewery can enjoy a guided tour of the sake production process and purchase Tsuchida Sake directly from the brewery shop.