Japan for Sake & Brewery Travelers

About this book

Every country can be seen, and most travellers stop there. But Japan, more than any country on earth, repays being tasted where it is made. It is a nation that plants a special rice for one drink alone and breeds it like a bloodline; that guards its well waters as civic treasure and names its styles after mountains, rivers and snow; that hangs a ball of cedar over a brewery gate to announce the year's new sake to the whole street; whose brewing is still a winter trade, run by guilds of master brewers who migrate with the cold; and whose sake towns — the storehouse streets, the canal quarters, the snow-buried lanes — form a second map of the country, drawn entirely in rice and water.

This book is a guide to that second map. Its unit is neither the brewery — the shelf owns its great brewery catalogue, three hundred houses described entry by entry the way catalogues deserve — nor the bottle, nor the style chart, nor the history of the drink, which belong to their own fine literatures. Its unit is the sake traveller's day itself, composed as one traveller's journey: the ground claimed, the day's tasting taken in its order, the record kept, and the whole handed over complete. Two hundred of those days are designed here, each around the same four questions. Which ground does the day claim, and on what terms? What is tasted there, in what order, and by what measure is the day judged? How is the day kept — logged, tokened, filed — so that it survives its own evening? And what do the ground, its brewers and its sake ask of the guest who comes to taste?

Japan answers the sake traveller's questions generously. It will give you a morning on a street where five breweries stand in a row, an afternoon tracing a famous cup back to the paddy it grew in, an evening at the counter where the day's last verdict is delivered by food. It will give you the winter street where the snow is the cellarage, the festival yard where the year's first pressing is poured among its own vats, the port where the sake and the crab share a season and a street. This guide designs two hundred such days: the great districts, the snow country, the castle towns, the ports and islands, the rice country, the opening days, the evening tables, and the craft of composing a brewery day anywhere at all.

A word on honesty, because method here is a form of it. Breweries are workplaces in a food-production season; tours open and close with the brewing; festivals belong to their weeks; a gate that poured last year may rest this year. This guide therefore asserts none of those changeable things: no tour, tasting, price or hour is promised anywhere in it, and every entry closes by naming the official channel through which its day is to be confirmed. A word, too, on the drink itself: sake is alcohol, the legal drinking age in Japan is twenty, and no day in this book is designed to be drunk at the expense of the next one — water stands beside every cup in these pages, and no traveller here drives after the first pour.

Eight parts: the great districts · snow country · castle towns & old streets · ports, coasts & islands · mountain valleys & rice country · the new-sake season · the evening table · and a closing craft part — 25 method days (choosing the ground, ordering a tasting, keeping the record, the brewer's manners, the one bottle carried home) that teach you to compose a brewery day anywhere.