ISSUE 013  ·  OCTOBER 31, 2026

Happy Halloween. This week's brewery is called The Void and puts tentacles on its labels, so tonight felt like the right night for it.

The Void Sake Company is Kentucky's first sake brewery, right in bourbon country, and some of its visitors walk in looking for bourbon. Its house sake, The Messenger, is this week's One Bottle. The Explainer takes on nihonshu, the Japanese word for the drink, and why no American brewery is allowed to use it.

Last Call has five ways to drink sake with other people this month, from a cheese night in Nashville to a holiday dinner in Asheville.

Lexington, Kentucky, is bourbon country, and some people find The Void Sake Company by accident. They search for distilleries, a sake brewery comes up, and in they walk. The team doesn't mind. There are no stills to show them, Justin LeVaughn told SAKETIMES, but there is a koji room. Koji is rice grown with a friendly mold, and it's what lets rice ferment at all.

Koji is also how The Void began. Justin and Brandon Floan were craft beer brewers who tried a beer with Japanese ingredients, met koji, and were, in Justin's words, "kind of blown away by it." They didn't know much sake yet, so they fixed that the fun way: "We tried to basically drink as much as we could." Then came John Gauntner's courses, a translated Japanese brewing textbook and a lot of help from other American brewers, Andrew Centofante of North American Sake Brewery (our issue 009) among them. With their friend Joe Rice, they opened in 2021.

The name came from two places: a shared love of dark fantasy in the H. P. Lovecraft vein, and how little sake there was in Kentucky. "I think it was Brandon who said, 'I guess we'll just fill that void,'" Justin remembers, "and that was it!" So the labels are black and white, all triangles and tentacles, with names like The Messenger, Reanimator and Echoes. The point, Justin says, is curiosity, not fright.

The lineup now runs from that everyday junmai to flavored nigori (cloudy sake) like The Shining One, a tangerine creamsicle. Brandon put the mission plainly back in 2021: "I want people to know that sake is more than a novelty. That it's definitely pretty damn neat."

If you're in Lexington, the taproom is open Tuesday through Sunday. Follow @thevoidsake for what's pouring.

JUNMAI  ·  KENTUCKY, USA

Look at that label: tentacles rising out of an ink-wash sky. On Halloween, that's reason enough. But The Messenger is also The Void's house sake, the bottle the brewery calls "our standard junmai."

The brewery describes it as "light and delicate, fruity and easy drinking," and it took a silver medal at the 2021 New York World Wine & Spirits Competition. Pour it lightly chilled in a wine glass and hand it to the friend who thinks sake only comes hot in a tiny cup.

Where to buy: The Void on VinoShipper, $25 a bottle, checked October 31, 2026, or at the taproom in Lexington.

In Japanese, sake (酒) just means alcohol. Beer is sake. Wine is sake. The word for the rice drink we cover is nihonshu (日本酒), "Japanese sake."

There's also a legal word, seishu (清酒), "clear sake." Japan's Liquor Tax Act defines it as a drink under 22% alcohol made by fermenting rice, koji and water, then filtering it. The filtering is the part that matters. Even cloudy nigori gets filtered, just through a coarser cloth, so "unfiltered" on a nigori label isn't quite right. The one sake that truly skips the filter is doburoku, and Japanese law taxes it as a different drink altogether (issue 011 has more).

Then, on December 25, 2015, Japan's National Tax Agency made nihonshu a protected name, a geographical indication, the same idea as Champagne. To carry the word, a sake has to be brewed in Japan from Japanese rice.

So The Messenger, brewed in Lexington from California rice, can never be nihonshu. It can still be sake: the protection leaves that word alone, and a US Department of Agriculture report at the time expected little effect on American brewers. Which is why a Kentucky label can print 純米, junmai, and mean every character.

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Junmai (純米) means "pure rice." A junmai sake is made from just rice, koji and water. Nothing else goes in, including the splash of distilled alcohol some brewers add to other styles. Unlike ginjo or daiginjo, junmai has no rule about how much of each grain gets polished away, so the word tells you what's in the bottle, not how fancy it is. Spot 純米 on a label, like The Messenger's, and it's rice all the way down.