ISSUE 010  ·  OCTOBER 9, 2026

Last issue we promised a report from Sake Block, Noah Sain's first sake festival, held on World Sake Day at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, FL. It leads this issue, and it opens a new section, Field Notes: what we saw when we went.

Up in Pennsylvania, Sango Kura has opened The Sakade in downtown Easton, a sake bar with pinball and axe throwing. It's in Last Call with three other dates.

This week: who poured at Sake Block, a 1980 bottle that put ginjo in front of everyday drinkers, why a Nashville brewer recreates Japanese water, and where sparkling sake gets its bubbles.

Sake Block was Noah Sain's idea, and on October 1 it was his domain. Sain, beverage director at St. Petersburg's In Between Days, ran his first festival with plenty of help from family and friends, at the Morean Center for Clay: pouring tables around the walls, high-tops in the middle, about ten tables of sake in all. We were there.

VIP guests came in at 5. Sain welcomed them, talked through the night ahead, took a few questions and led a kanpai ("cheers"). Every VIP got a sake cup made by students at the Morean, no two alike. The first pour was Bōken's Tsubame, a limited-release junmai daiginjo from Hiraizumi Honpo in Akita, poured by Bōken's Melissa Hoffman. General admission opened at 6.

Three American breweries poured. Proper Sake, from Nashville, brought three namachozō, sake stored raw and pasteurized once, at bottling: The Diplomat, Cloud Palace and Soft Power, all brewed with Titan rice from Isbell Farms in Arkansas. Brooklyn Kura shared a table with Dassai and poured Lake Effect and Number Fourteen. From Miami came Shōjō's Dojo, which bills itself as Florida's first sake brewery and bar. Both owners, Haidar Hachem and Mari Orozco, poured their own sake, including a truly unfiltered one so thick you could chew on it, and the night's only cocktail, a sake cosmopolitan.

Japan's presence in the room was just as wide. Yoko Suzuki of Suzuki Brewing, the Akita maker of Hideyoshi, had her own table; the brewery's brochure dates it to 1689. World Sake Imports poured Dewazakura and Kamoizumi, including this week's One Bottle. Namazake Paul poured his imports, a sparkling among them, and Sake Suki poured from the Japanese craft breweries it imports. SOTO poured its namesake sakes, which it sources from multiple breweries in Japan. And a Niigata table set out rice polished to different degrees beside ordinary table rice, so you could see what a polishing ratio actually takes away.

Most tables' bottles were for sale at In Between Days' bottle shop in the room. Outside were ceramic artisans, food tents, Midnight Yakitori among them, and a jazz trio led by Chance Reynolds that kept the night grooving.

Early on, the crowd was Sain's sake club and people who already knew him. Later came a mix of regulars and first-timers. It was great to see so many American bottles on the tables.

What stayed with us was the range. One room held sakes that were dry and fruity, sparkling, cloudy, thick, and rich and savory. If your experience of sake is only one bottle, a night like this is the quickest way to find out how far sake really goes.

GINJO  ·  YAMAGATA, JAPAN

When Dewazakura put Oka on the market in 1980, ginjo was a sake few drinkers had heard of. The brewery priced Oka for ordinary drinkers, and its US importer, World Sake Imports, credits the label with popularizing ginjo. Other breweries followed with ginjo labels of their own. "And so began one of the most creative periods in the history of sake," the importer writes.

The importer lists Dewasansan and Haenuki rice polished to 50 percent, 15 to 16 percent alcohol, Ogawa yeast, a sokujo (quick-fermentation) starter, acidity of 1.2 and an SMV of +5. SMV, sake meter value, is a rough gauge of dryness; the higher the plus, the drier it tends to taste. True Sake lists different rice, Miyamanishiki and Yuki Kessho, so the sources disagree there. The tasting words are the importer's: "soft-feeling on the tongue," and "floral rather than fruity, though there is a touch of pear, and perhaps melon." Serve it well chilled. World Sake Imports poured it at Sake Block.

Where to buy: True Sake, $45 for 720 ml or $18 for 300 ml; Palate Project, $48 for 720 ml, which doesn't ship to Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi or Utah. Both showed it in stock, checked October 9, 2026.

Sake is about 80 percent water, and brewing uses far more than ends up in the bottle. Counting washing, soaking and dilution, a brewery can go through 50 times the weight of its rice in water, according to SAKE Street. So brewers care about what's in it.

What matters is minerals. Hardness is a measure of calcium and magnesium. Some minerals, such as potassium, magnesium and phosphorus, feed the yeast. Others, such as iron and manganese, hurt the taste, so brewers filter them out.

Japan's two classic brewing towns show the difference. Nada, in Hyogo, brews with harder water called miyamizu. The yeast works fast and the sake comes out dry, which is why Nada sake was called otokozake, "male sake." Fushimi, in Kyoto, has softer water. Fermentation runs slower and the sake is gentler: onnazake, "female sake." Very soft water was long thought too difficult to brew with until 1898, when the Hiroshima brewer Senzaburo Miura worked out a soft-water method, and Hiroshima joined Nada and Fushimi as a sake center.

Proper Sake's table cards at Sake Block show an American brewer taking this literally. Founder Byron Stithem, who per the card brewed at Yoshida Shuzo in Ishikawa, builds his water to order. The Diplomat and Cloud Palace use "mineral forward water simulating the harder profile of the Ishikawa region." Soft Power uses a mid-mineral profile modeled on Chiba's. A brewery in Tennessee can't borrow a Japanese spring, so it builds the water instead.

Several tables at Sake Block poured one, and the bubbles can get there three ways, according to WSET. The simplest is injecting carbon dioxide, as with soda. The second is a secondary fermentation, in the bottle or in a tank, the way sparkling wine is made. The third is bottling a live, coarsely filtered, unpasteurized nigori (cloudy sake) that keeps fermenting and builds its own pressure, so open those slowly.

Japan's Awasake Association, founded in 2016, certifies a stricter style called AWA SAKE: bubbles from fermentation only, clear in the glass, at least 10 percent alcohol and at least 3.5 bar of pressure. The idea is older than it looks. SAKE Street traces a carbonated sake drink to Hawaii in 1939.