Saito Shuzo Sake Brewery (Kyoto, Japan)

Mr Fujimoto, showing a fermenter Fushimi, Kyoto Prefecture (Japan)
There are several distinct sake regions in Japan, and Kyoto is one of them. Most of the wineries of the area are located in the Fushimi sector, and actually Fushimi is said to produce some of the best sake of Japan thanks to a long tradition and excellent water quality. On the small surface of 2 square kilometers around here, there are 25 sake breweries (there were 41 breweries 40 years ago), and this southern district of Kyoto has made the whole region shine in the eyes of sake lovers. The Saito Shuzo brewery sits in this small town of Fushimi, on the outskirts of Kyoto, and it is now part of the wider Kyoto area. Fushimi has been in the past on a strategic road where all sort of goods would pass through, including rice. The area had also a very fine-quality spring water named Fusui and that was enough, along with an important population living nearby to motivate the setting up of sake breweries.
Like other quality sake breweries, Saito Shuzo closes down during summer and the larger hot season, so all the work is done mostly in winter and early spring. Thanks to our friend Ayumi from Kyoto, we could visit the Saito Shuzo brewery, and the three of us walked from the Fushimi train station to the brewery (pictured on right).
We were offered to wait in a comfortable guest room, and after a while a discreet man came with three cups of tea and he left us for a couple of minutes. When he returned accompanied by another man to begin the interview, we discovered that this man was no less than the president of the brewery and the family heir of this old brewery. This is Japan, where humility and etiquette go on pair with excellence...
During several minutes, Saito-san explained to us how the brewery was founded, giving key dates and turning points in the long history of Saito Shuzo.
Picture on left : Mr Toru Saito, president, sitting on the right, with Mr Fujimoto (general director) at his side.

Iwai rice First, something about the rice has to be said : the Kyoto region is home to a very particular type of rice named Iwai. This rice quality is particularly suited for deep polishing, the operation through which a relatively large proportion of the outer shell is thined out, leaving only the core of the grain, and this inner grain takes water in particularly well on Iwai rice. During WW2 the growers had been encouraged to grow more productive varieties of rice [reminds me something] and so they uprooted stopped sowing iwai rice, and it's only around the 1990s' that with the demand for high-end sakes, this variety was replanted and used again for sake making [reminds me something again]. From what I understood, Saito Shuzo buys 40 % of the Iwai rice grown in the region, and the best sake are made from it, like Eijun and Izutsuya Ihei Iwaimai, both being junmai daiginjo polished to 35 %.
A sake-type variety of rice is made slightly differently from a regular table rice (to use a term akin to table grape) : the fat and the proteins are on the outside part while the starch is located in the core of the grain, that's why the grain looks opalescent with a distinctly-white nucleus, or shinpaku (picture on right). This shinpaku has tiny cavities that take water in quite easily, which is good for the steaming and the fermentation. The intake of water is actually more arduous on "regular" rice, but for costs reasons, most sakes of the cheaper price range are made with common rice, leaving the exclusive varieties for high-end sake. To make it short, this Iwai rice costs twice the price of a basis-variety rice. On the picture on right (click to enlarge), you can guess the shinpaku nucleus (shinpaku means white heart, by the way). The purchase of Iwai rice is reserved for sakemaking, you can't buy some for kitchen use.
The outer shell of the rice is polished out also because excessive amounts of proteins would imbalance the fermentation of sake and result in less refined aromas, from what I understand. The polishing ratio can go down to 35 % of the original grain volume, the best sakes being made with the thinest-milled grains of course, and the best varieties, which also explains the price. If you keep ony 35 % of the grain (and from a costly variety), that means that you need to buy much more rice for the same volume of sake.
You can learn more by reading this page where you'll find pictures of grains with varying polishing ratio.. Fujimoto-san showing the rice-washing machine There's something interesting about the origin of this sake brewery : before turning to making sake toward the end of the 19th century, the family was in the kimono business. It has to be said that at that time, Fushimi was right on the route from Osaka to Kyoto. People travelling from Osaka would reach Fushimi by boat, and then walk to Kyoto, passing in front of the kimono merchant, there would be regular travellers but also pilgrims on their way to a temple, and kimono sales were thriving. But in 1880, with Meiji-era's modernism in full throttle, a railway was built through Fushimi and almost overnight, the kimono business stood at a standstill as people wouldn't walk through anymore. The daring family ancestor who decided to move the business from kimono to sake was 18 years old then. He died very young at the age of 32, and his son who was 8 then, later took the reins of the brewery. This young boy was the fore-fore-grandfather of Mr Toru Saito who today presides the brewery.
This short History sum-up is necessary because when you reach the facility in this urban landscape typical of large Japanese cities, you can't imagine that behind this square, modern building, a long tradition has been slowly brewing through more than a century.
We begin our facility visit by the rice-washing part of the brewery : as you know, rice has to be washed and immersed in water a certain time before the steaming and the fermentation, so that it gets soaked at the right proportion. On the picture above, Mr Fujimoto shows us the washing room. The water quality is central and at Saito Shuzo, they pump water from two wells, one 10 meter deep and the other one 70 meter deep. The water of the region is a soft type of water, with a low level of minerals. Washing tanks The facility was not active on the day we visited, although it was still the sake-making season, so we didn't see any worker except the highly respected Toji, who it seems looks upon his brewery even when other workers are at rest. The Toji is the head worker in the brewery, he is the sensei who has the total authority and control, based on a long experience. The other brewery workers are named kurabito. There is also some prestige in the kurabito status, as sake-making requires precision and excellence.
These tanks above are washing tanks where the rice is washed per batches of 10 kilograms. The washing is now made with a machine at Saito shuzo, having replace the labor-intensive traditional washing that you can still find in small breweries throughout Japan. You can see several pictures about this hand washing work that I shot during our visit 4 years ago at the Himonoya sake brewery, in Nihonmatsu, Kukushima Prefecture. This hand washing of the bags is very impressive, almost ritual like, it is timed very precisely like a music partition, all the workers dumping the rice bags at the same time in the water and taking them out together a couple of minutes later, that's a real choregraphy we were happy to witness then. Today's machines at Saito Shuzo reproduce this traditional water washing and soaking with a scientific precision. The rice-steaming steel tank Partly hidden by metal poles, you can see on the picture above the heart of an essential part of the sake brewery : the continuous-steaming tank where rice comes in and then goes into the cooling stage before the fermenter or the koji room. Inside this large steel block, the wet rice is steamed so that it gets in proper condition for the fermentation, on a precisely-timed schedule. It's closer to rice cooking here than steaming, just that it cooks with the water that has gone into the grains. This cooking/steaming will allow a faster transformation of the starch into glucose, a process which is called saccharification.
Sake making, while having many things in common with winemaking, is not immediately apprehended by a beginner like me, and so I recommend reading a summary about the process, for example the sake-brewing-process page that John Gauntner wrote on his Sake-world website. Drying gondolas The rice here has been through the koji-muro stage with mold developping through high temperature and humidity. It has been then loaded unto these drying/cooling gondolas, with air ventilating the rice through, so that it party dries and cools down before being [I guess] put into a fermentation tank along with larger volumes of steamed rice, water and the starter yeast batch. Water tanks From what I understand, these two big vats are where the rice is being liquefied, the liquefying process allowing an easier control of the temperature, especially for large volumes of rice. This may be used for larger sake cuvées, if I'm right.
Of course, already at this stage, the quality of water plays a role, even if there will be much more of it added at the filling of the fermenters. Note the immaculate hygiene in this brewery, this place is spotless in spite of all these intermingled tools, containers and conveyor belts. The Koji room Then we walked to a door behind which you could find a large stainless-steel room with a very long and heavy wooden table in the middle. We had to put special shoes usedonly inside this room and left outside the white boots that we had been wearing until then. This is the koji room, where part of the steamed rice will be sprinkled with powerdered mold in order to develop the fermentation process. The steamed rice which has been cooled and aerated beforehand is put onto the table on a large white sheet under a temperature of 30 ° Celsius and 100 % humidity. The mold-sprinkled rice will stay anout a day in there, before being brought to the next stage, the fermentation stage. 4 people are working in this room when there's rice being prepared. The 2nd Koji room (koji muro) After a day simmering in the hot, high-humidity room, the rice is brought in this second room, the koji-muro, on small wooden crates which will be piled up all around the room, at about 15 crates high. The koji feels well on cedar wood and it will grow if the temperature and the humidity level is good. There's a wooden lid on the crate at the top so that the rice doesn't dry.The koji stage lasts two days a week, one day in the large room on the table, and one day in this smaller, wood paneled room. Typically, Mr Fujimoto says, the rice arrives in this room in the morning at about 5 am in the morning, and will be carried out the following day at 3pm or 4pm. We visited right between two koji sessions, the previous was a friday and the next was the following monday. Seems like a bad timing but actually, we may have not be able to walk into these rooms when rice goes through its koji stage, because the mold is very sensitive to outside influence and only the allowed staff can come and go.
This stacking of crates may look easy to understand but there's a very subtle play with temperature in this stage : they check regularly the temperature of the rice in the different crates and they can put the different crates of a stack at a varrying angle so that air comes in and the temperature drops a bit. A sheet also covers the whole stack to maintain the humidity level. There's also a very hot temperature in there when koji is being made, about 35 ° C. This room looks like a sauna room or a Russian banya, but that's almost what it is, just a bit cooler so that the mold can handle it.
The wood panels around and above this room, beyond the temperature inertia they may bring, could also have a role in providing a yeast cloud to help the koji process from batch to batch, that's something that would be interesting to ask.
On the picture on left, you can see the high security double-door airlock leading to the first koji room, with the devoted work-shoes in-between and the small sink & disinfectant sprayer on the left. Koji making is a serious business, and the sensitive mold is well taken care of... The starter room We now walk into what is not really a room, as it is a corner of the facility near the steaming machine which is delimited by a plastic sheet. This is the yeast room where two weeks will be needed to develop the yeast mix. The temperature in the vats is 18 ° C. They don't need actually to have this stage done is a regular room or walled with these plastic sheets, but next to this handful of open tanks, they're using a different strain of yeast and so they just wanted the two batches not to interfere with each other. The tanks are half full with a milky liquid with a yogurt texture which is called shubo if I'm right. The shubo is a mix of water, steamed rice with koji, and yeasts. There's a large wooden pole in the tank, it is used to stir the liquid from time to time. This shubo is a yeast culture made from selected yeasts. The Yeast selections and tubes are provided by the powerful Japan Sake Makers Association, which is overlooking the quality of yeasts, rice and other ingredients used in the breweries. Each yeast tube has an identification number and transparency is important here. You can see Fujimoto-san on the right looking at yeast tubes he took out of the freezer for a minute. The most circulated yeast in Japan is known under the name of Kyokai N° 7, or shorter N° 7, or K7. From what I read, it was first isolated in 1946 from a sake brewery in Nagano Prefecture. It's the most commonly-used yeast strain for sake brewing.
Even though the base yeast is provided by the Sake Makers Association, they make their own culture broth in laboratory glassware before using the liquid in these larger tanks. Liquid koji At this stage, Fujimoto-san walks to an old-looking small cabinet from which he grabs a glass container with an amber-color liquid inside. This is some sort of liquid koji which is going to be used in the large fermentation tanks along with the starter, the steamed rice and the mold-treted koji rice. Koji has many aspects it seems, and one has to know that koji is central to many things Japanese, not only sake but also seemingly-unrelated liquids like Miso soup and soya sauce (see this page for more info). Sake making is more complicated than it looks and I'm a beginner, so forgive me if I don't report the process correctly. There will be a gradual mixing of all these elements in large vats until the fermentation can thrive with the right balance of fermenting agents, rice and water, and the balance has a lot to do with the aromatic features of the resulting sake.
Sake making looks very different from brewery to brewery, and you can have a look on the different sake-making stages in a small brewery by visiting this very informative web page in English with many pictures (they're small but click-on to have a large version). It's made by someone who manages a sake shop in Sapporo (the blog is alas on hiatus since july 2010). And for the previous stages of rice polishing, rice washing, rice steaming and koji making, see this other page, this is really a unique first hand report. Takao Moriguchi, the Toji, with Fujimoto-san Then we walked to the part of the facility where you find the large fermenters. Through a maze of metal walkways and stairs you can climb among them and have a glimpse into their fermenting inside. He shows us a tank with enough sake to make 700 bottles with the traditional volume of 1,8 liter. He says that the foam level has been going down after a peak in the last days. The sake cuvée is Ichignin, this is a Junmai Daiginjo polished to 35 % , a high-end sake which costs costs 10 000 Yen a bottle. See the sake-range page at Saito Shozu. He says that when you bend a bit and waive your hand to smell the emanations, you can feel some acidity. Toji-san Moriguchi, stirring a batch of fermenting rice All these fermenters have a layer of foam at the surface of the fermenting rice, and some have a twin-blade switcher hanging from the top to keep the foam from building up. Like on the open wooden fermenters found in Burgundy, you have plastic sheets covering the vats to keep the CO2 inside and avoid oxydation.
Two of the vats in there hold the iconic Eikun Daiginjo Iwai sake, which has been winning the top prize for 14 consecutive years at the Japan National New Sake Awards. Now, coming in may, the 100th edition of these Sake Awards will take place, and they will see if they get gold for this sake for the 15th year in a row, the suspense is thrilling because no other brewery until now ever got a sake prized there for 15 years in line... The tasting is blind, so there's no trick for such or such brewery to safeguard its position. For the anecdote, this Eikun sake was made from the Yamada Nishiki rice variety for the 10 first years it got a gold medal, after which they took the risky step to make it with the Iwai variety, and they kept winning gold for the 4 following years until now...
Read this sake-world page about the 2011 edition of the Awards, which was eagerly followed by sake amateurs as it took place a full year after the earthquaque/tsunami and the nuclear accident.
You can see on the left the lined funnels and their respective bottles to take the samples of the differents vats for lab analysis. Watch this short video shot is a small brewery to see how the samples are taken from a given vat (from several parts of the vat). There's lots in common with wine in many regards, which helps understand things without needing further explanations. Smelling the fermenting rice turning into sake A nice and rare experience during that visit was to have the opportunity to have an olfactory impression about the fermenting rice gradually turning into sake. This is simply done by waving the hand while standing above the vats to pull some air and smell its aromas. That's all about nuances and I guess that the Toji can this way understand and follow his nascent sake like a vintner feels his future wine by tasting the vats. Amazing. On this video uou can see the Toji at the end using the long stick to stir the fermenting rice. Like on a ship Unlike what I saw in most wineries that I visited in France, sake breweries are organized so that you can climb and wander on the top of the vats to do whatever you need to, stir the rice, check the foam or see the temperature by yourself. You feel like on a freight ship with metal floor through which the water can flow, access ways and guide rails, welcome on board. The feeling again is that it allows a perfect hygiene, as you can hose down the whole thing and let the water drain away by itself. As the top of the vats tnemselves are not flat, there's no risk of water puddles macerating.
You can see here the diverse volumes being brewed, there's room for small high-end cuvées and also for more generic sakes, the latter being probably made from more a more affordable variety like Yamada Nishiki while the smaller vats may use the rare Iwai rice. The two presses Here in front of the two odd-looking horizontal presses, named yabuta in japanese, which look like an accordion or a giant file-hanging system recycled from the 1970s'. I see also similitudes with winemaking, with in particular the small vat in front of each press with a pump to rack the sake regularly into the fermenter. The one on the left is for Ginjo, the other for basic sake.
The fermented rice or moroni is split between these many hanging sheets which are pressed together by this powerful machine. After the complete removal of liquids, the almost dry mash is being recovered almost intact in flat rectangles named kasu which will find their way in the food chain, as either after a short cooking it is an appreciated ingredient of the Japanese cuisine, or it can be grilled and eaten as snack. See on this short video how the pressed moromi or kasu is being taken out carefully to get an additional drying and packaging before being shipped to specialized shops. See the other videos shot by this user, they are very interesting, including this one showing how free-run juice is recovered from hanging bags full of moromi.
Fujimoto-san shows us such moroni pancakes ready for shipping (pic on right).
Fujimoto-san says that much of the sake of a given vintage is already sold in december, I guess that there is also a lot of advance purchase by the wholesale buyers and the shops. Sake making begins in october and continues during the winter until april, in spring, making roughly 6 months of production.
The room pictured on the left is a very cold, air-conditioned room with 8 mysterious-looking demijohns. From what I understood, sake is left there to sediment its lees and is afterwards filled into bottles which are kept in ice-cold buckets of water (covered with white sheets here). This is competition sake where the filtration mode is different and the least violent as possible, the lees and solid parts just deposit through time and cold temperature. After 5 days here, the bottles will be pasteurized and cooled immediately. What you see here is the best of the best sake made in this brewery, this sake will take part to the Japan National Awards. Tasting the sake __Shihori sake (not sure of the spelling), 65 % polished. Refined. Made this winter, a wholly-new sake.
__ Koto Sen Nen (Junmai). From last year, 60 % polished. Nice mouth feel. We're said it can be drank at a warm temperature.
__ Koto Sen Nen, but Junmai Ginjo, polished at 55 % (milled more thoroughly). Onctuous sake, delicious, with a nice length. A few more micro-milimeters of milling certainly make a difference. Can be had warm too. But it's so good this way, I really don't see the point to heat sake, in general.
__ Another Junmai Ginjo. Here the mouth feel is straight, almost mineral, very classy sake. Light bitterness too, says Fujimoto-san.
__ Eikun Junmai Daiginjo, polished down to 35 % of the original grain. Iwai rice variety. the top sake here. Very refined and aerial type of sake.
__ Same sake than #4 (no name), but from this vintage. Very aromatic sake with hints of menthol, laurel leaves, and fruits like apple and pear. Very nice.
__ Eikun, the top sake, just brewed very shortly ago. Very intense mouth, with the aromas and sapidity echoing through the palate. Very enjoyable drink. Thank you to Mr Saito and Mr Fujimoto for their attention and their time.

Saito Shuzo Co. LTD. 105 Misu Yashikimachi, Yokooji Fushimi-ku, Kyoto 612-8207 Japan phone/fax +81 75 611 2124 sales [at] axisplan [dot] com www.eikun.com sake range Satellite/map location The Saito Shuzo brewery is not open to visitors

Fushimi street at night (Kyoto) I like particularly the side streets in the Japanese cities. Everyone looking to deepen his/her intuitive knowledge of the Japanese people should spend hours now and then walking randomly at dark in nondescript neighborhoods. there's lot of inspiration in there when you look at the urban landscape with an outsider point of view. There is no doubt for me that this is also an unsuspected photographer's paradise...