A Brewing Process You Won’t Find at other Major Breweries

The traditional process of sake brewing involves immense time and effort. No genuine quality sake is produced without a great passion and pursuit of perfection at every step from choosing the right ingredients, to polishing the rice, making the koji mold, shikomi preparation, and pressing.
One determining factor of a sake’s quality is the amount of pressure applied when straining out liquids. Shibori, the straining process, involves the dividing of moromi into sake and sake cake. In this process, squeezing with as little pressure as possible is the key to producing a good sake.
However, in recent times most sake breweries use an automated pressing machine to accomplish shibori, a method known as ‘Yabuta style’. This contemporary method allows time and cost reduction, but on the other hand, pressing these larger batches of moromi together at once can undermine the taste and flavor of sake. Thus, we have remained faithful to the traditional ‘Sase style’ shibori method over the entire history of our brewery. This style is carried out by carefully hand-stuffing moromi into cloth bags, stacking them, and slowly pressing from the top to extract the sake. As this method only produces a small amount of sake with a single pressing, the process is often repeated in subsequent pressings to extract all the sake that can be used for the final products. Of course, this process requires tremendous time and effort, and currently only 10% of sake breweries in Tochigi Prefecture still apply this process. However, we are committed to upholding this tradition as part of our goal to promote and preserve the pure and genuine sake flavor which is carefully crafted by human hands. This fuels our persistent devotion to the traditional style of brewing sake.