“I knew things had to change.” Nishida, whose wife’s family owned the brewery, had been working at Toshiba in nuclear energy. “I never thought I was going to work here,” he says. “I wasn’t born into this brewing family.” He asked his father-in-law for a part-time gig. For the first three years, he was working in the brewery from the crack of dawn to 10 or 11 pm, staying overnight when necessary.
“My dad was a fireman,” Nishida says. Coming from a world outside the brewery he saw everything with fresh eyes. But he had to work harder than everyone else to catch up. While he didn’t have experience making sake, he did have loads of experience drinking it, and he knew that, at that time, Denshu was no longer up to snuff.
In November of 2004, Nishida took over the family business. “The toji in those days was getting old, and because what we made was still well received, he didn’t want to change anything,” says Nishida. “He was complacent, and I wasn’t.” Nishida asked him to step down, hiring a younger toji. “I’m never satisfied, and I always want to improve.”
Every year Nishida contemplates how they can make better sake. “If we make sake that’s only as good as the last, I think we can’t satisfy customers. We need to push forward every year.” But now that the brewery is making top-level sake, isn’t it getting hard to improve? “There’s always something you can fix,” he says. For example, he bought a new pressing machine because sometimes the batches would be ready to press at the same time, and one batch would have to be selected over the other. Investing in another Yabuta filtration press means that the brewery can now press every batch at the right time, ensuring they’re bottling the best sake possible. Over the years, continual changes—and investments—like this have improved the brews. “I didn’t get another press to increase the quantity, just the quality,” says Nishida. “I only spend money on improving quality. Customers want more sake, but if we increased production, then the quality might drop. If the quality were to drop, I wouldn’t want to make the sake.”
The sake-making process from behind the picturesque facade of the Nishida Shuzoten Brewery, including hoisting rice out of the steamer to place in the cooling machine, inoculating the rice with koji, and bottling.
The model here isn’t what the brewery has done before, nor is it another famous sake brewery. Heck, Nishida isn’t even thinking of Denshu and the brewery’s other brand, Kikuizumi, as mere drinks. He looks to France for inspiration—and not to the country’s wine industry. “France is famous for its bag makers with long histories,” he says. “What I’m aiming at is Hermès, not Louis Vuitton. The difference is that Hermès increases quality, while Vuitton increases production. Vuitton is no good, right? Me, I’m for Hermès.”
A collection of colorful Denshu bottlings. Denshu, however, isn’t the brewery’s only brand. On the far left is a bottle of Utou-branded sake.
The most common press is the rectangle-shaped accordion-style automatic press, which uses air compression to press the sake, leaving behind easy-to-clean sheets of sake lees between the mesh dividers. It’s faster, easier, doesn’t result in sake oxidation, and is the preferred method.
The Yabuta automatic press, invented in 1963 by Noburo Yabuta of Daiwa Sake Brewing, dominates the sake industry. It is also used to press soy sauce, rice vinegar and red bean paste.
In the fukuro-tsuri (“hanging bag”) style of pressing, bags filled with sake are hung so that the contents slowly drip out over the course of eight hours or so, with deeply elegant results. It’s also known as fukuro shibori (“bag pressing”) or shizuku-shibori (“drip pressing”) as well as the grim-sounding kubi-tsuri (“hung by the neck”). The modern version was codified in 1965 at the Kumamoto Prefecture Sake Research Center. However, it’s believed the style could be a modern take on a centuries-old method that made sumisake (refined sake). Bureaucratic records written on wooden tablets in the 8th century, unearthed in the imperial Heijo Palace ruins in Nara, mention sumisake. The assumption is that unfiltered sake, now called doburoku, was somehow run through a cloth. Since this gentle method isn’t ideal for large volumes, it’s often reserved for special daiginjo-shu.
A modern spin (literally) on the gravity-powered hanging-bag style of pressing is centrifugal separation, which speeds up the slow-drip method. Here, the sake is put into a stainless-steel centrifuge machine and spun around to press the sake. This produces a brew that is similar in character to drip sake. The process, was patented in 2005 and only around ten sake breweries own the pricey machine. Asahi Shuzo, maker of the brand Dassai, was the first in Japan to press its sake in this way.
A brewer at Miyako Bijin on Awaji Island wears a rain jacket while filling bags to press sake. To-be-pressed sake drips out of the spout as he folds the bags and stacks them one by one.
The old-fashioned tenbin shibori process at Miyako Bijin is helped along with a modern forklift.
The tenbin-shibori, or “balance press,” was common in the Edo period, but is now a rare way to press sake. Tenbin-shibori uses a sakabune-style press—bags of sake are filled, folded and stacked in a rectangular box. Unlike in modern sakabune, where the pressure is applied mechanically, the tenbin-shibori method uses rocks balanced from a beam to press the sake.
Miyako Bijin on Awaji Island is one of the few breweries in Japan that still uses this time-consuming method. “We had a sakabune and wanted to do something with it,” says brewery president Hirotsugu Hisada. The beam is kashinoki, a type of Japanese oak, brought all the way from Kyushu. During the late 19th century, when Japan modernized rapidily, much of the prime lumber, which takes over 100 years to reach suitable size, was chopped down for domestic needs and export. Finding strong, hard lumber of this size today is not easy.
Then, there’s the amount of time it takes to press the sake with the tenbin-shibori method. At Miyako Bijin, brewers spend an hour just filling all the bags with 1,000 liters (260 gallons) of unpressed sake. It takes 46 to 48 hours to squeeze it all out. During this period, brewers must move the weight and the position of the rocks on the beam to the correct balance so that the sake is uniformly pressed. “We have to do this slowly,” explains Miyako Bijin’s toji Kunihiro Yamauchi, “so that the bags don’t explode.” The whole process takes three days. In comparison, an automatic hydraulic press can squeeze 3,000 liters (800 gallons) of sake in just 12 hours. Tenbin-shibori is taxing, which is why Miyako Bijin only does it about seven times a year, using an automatic press for most of its sake. The effort is worth it. “Tenbin-shibori is more gentle than a modern sakabune,” says Yamauchi. “With tenbin-shibori, the sake is pressed slowly and delicately, so you end up with a very soft sake.”
This isn’t sake, but rather, bottles of Miyako Bijin’s brewing water. Sake makers
