ISSUE 009  ·  OCTOBER 1, 2026

Happy World Sake Day. Japan's sake makers named October 1 Sake Day back in 1978, and why they picked that date is this week's Sake 101. Tonight we're at Sake Block, Noah Sain's first festival, at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, FL. The report is in next week's issue.

The celebrating runs through the weekend, and two American kura (sake breweries) have birthdays on Saturday. North American Sake Brewery in Charlottesville turns eight. Nova Brewing in Covina, California, turns seven and is debuting a new sake for the occasion. Both parties are free, and both are in Last Call with everything else.

This week: a Virginia brewer who bet on American rice, a bottle from an old Asheville auto shop, and the mold that makes sake possible.

Andrew Centofante learned to make sake from YouTube videos, as Virginia Living put it in 2023. By his brewery's telling, it started with a homebrew batch after a few too many bottles and a basement turned into a brewhouse; SAKETIMES adds koji growing in his attic. A YouTube video also led him to Daimon Shuzo, a brewery near Osaka more than 200 years old. He emailed them and went to learn.

North American Sake Brewery opened in Charlottesville's IX Art Park on August 25, 2018. Its own site dates the founding to 2016 and names a co-founder, Jeremy Goldstein; most coverage since credits Centofante alone. He is still the head brewer, and he helped found the Sake Brewers Association of North America.

The rice is the interesting part. Most of the lineup lists Titan, a short grain from Arkansas. On the page for Quiet Giant, a dry, undiluted junmai, Centofante describes a bolder bet: sake rice is "very hard to get a hold of" in the US, so he built a brew on Calrose, a familiar American rice that he says "would be unheard of in Japan" for sake. The spec box on that same page now lists Titan, so the recipe may have moved on. His hundredth batch went the other way. 100 Dreams uses Yamada Nishiki from Osaka and was brewed with Daimon; the brewery bills it as the first Japanese-American sake collaboration made on US soil.

SAKETIMES reports that Virginia's winery laws are why the place serves food. The kitchen became Bad Luck Ramen in 2023 and, this August, Sanga, a six-seat omakase counter run by chef Yoshihiro Tauchi that booked up through October within two days, according to Cville Right Now. The house motto, per SAKETIMES: "we make seriously good sake without taking ourselves too seriously." Hence a junmai daiginjo named Serenity Now.

Visit: the tasting room is at 522 2nd St SE, Charlottesville, and Saturday's eighth-birthday party is free all day. The brewery also ships from its own online shop to some states.

JUNMAI GINJO  ·  ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

Ben's brews in a converted auto shop on Asheville's South Slope, sharing the building with a restaurant and beer garden, Ben's Tune Up. Head brewer Patrick Shearer came from SakeOne in Oregon in 2018, and The Laurel of Asheville reported that he started buying koji spores directly from Japan. The brewery calls itself "unabashedly American," and much of what it makes is fruit infusions and spritzer cans. Black Label Premium is its straight sake: a junmai ginjo, filtered, 14 percent alcohol.

Ben's doesn't publish the rice, the polishing ratio or the yeast, for this bottle or any other. The tasting language is the brewery's own too: "vanilla, bubblegum, and light cherry," it says, dry, with the koji's umami keeping "the body and mouthfeel full." The taproom menu puts it more simply: "Light, dry, and crisp." One thing the brewery's materials disagree on: the online shop calls this bottle pasteurized, while the taproom menu says everything it pours is unpasteurized.

Where to buy: Ben's own online shop, $15 for a 375 ml bottle, checked October 1, 2026. Florida is on its shipping list. Only a few bottles were showing when we looked; the same shop sells the Natural Nigori at the same price. In the Carolinas, the brewery lists dozens of shops and restaurants that carry it.

Rice has no sugar. It has starch, and yeast can't ferment starch. Grapes bring their own sugar to wine. Sake needs a helper, and the helper is koji: steamed rice grown over with a mold, Aspergillus oryzae. The mold's enzymes break the rice's starch into sugar, and others break its protein into amino acids, a big part of where sake's umami comes from.

Making koji is slow, hands-on work. Brewers dust the steamed rice with spores, koji-kin, and tend it for about two days in a warm, humid room, the koji-muro, kept around 30°C (86°F), turning and heaping the rice by hand in set stages. Japan's sake makers' association says the mold grows best near 36°C (97°F) and stops working above 45°C (113°F). About a fifth of the rice in a batch becomes koji.

Then koji and yeast go into the tank together and work at the same time: starch to sugar, sugar to alcohol. The association calls it multiple parallel fermentation and says no other alcoholic drink is made that way.

How the mold spreads shapes the sake. Koji covering each grain evenly, sō-haze, works hard and makes a fuller sake. Koji in spots, tsuki-haze, works gently and is what ginjo and daiginjo are made with. Brewers have a saying for the order of importance, which SAKE Street translates as "First koji, then yeast, and lastly brewing."

Japan's national sake makers' association named October 1 Sake Day, Nihonshu no Hi, in 1978. Two reasons. October is the tenth month, and the tenth sign of the old zodiac is 酉 (tori), a character that began as a picture of a sake jar. And October 1 used to open Japan's brewing year, the year a label's "BY" counts, until the tax authorities moved the start to July 1 in 1965. The season still fits: October is when the new rice comes in and breweries start brewing.