ISSUE 006  ·  SEPTEMBER 11, 2026

Seventeen independent American craft breweries poured on an open-air deck in West LA on Saturday, September 5, alongside Dassai Blue and Gekkeikan USA, the two Japanese-owned facilities that brew on American soil. It is the largest gathering the North American sake industry holds all year.

Six days on, we cannot find an account of what happened on that floor. The festival's own Instagram had not posted since September 4, the day before its doors opened, when we looked on Wednesday. No trade outlet has run a report. In the Discord server where the American sake industry actually talks, the entire festival produced one sentence from one attendee, three reactions, and not a single follow-up question. Everyone who might have written it up was working.

What does exist is Friday. Industry Day published its schedule in full, and it is the closest thing there is to a record of what this industry gathered to discuss. That is this week's lead. Also: the festival's fundraising campaign closed at $12,680, a Niigata sake that spent three years in a room packed with snow, and why sake has no sulfites.

Industry Day ran Friday, September 4 at Sawtelle Sake's production facility in downtown Los Angeles — doors at 9:40 a.m., programming from 10:00, presented by Kitano Sake, open to VIP ticket holders, vendors, sponsors and volunteers. Nine talks, two closed meetings and a lunch break. Read the schedule end to end and the emphasis is unmistakable: this is an industry building infrastructure.

It opened with an engineering project. Justin LeVaughn of The Void Sake Co. presented a year-long University of Kentucky senior capstone that designed and built an automated system for the brewery's koji table — the shallow bed where steamed rice is inoculated with koji, the mold that turns rice starch into sugar, and the step brewers rank first in importance. The abstract pitches it as a template: a way for a small brewery to get real engineering done through a university.

Forty minutes later Justin Potts of Iida Trading Group introduced a new facility built to support sake fermentation research. The notable part is the ask. The session, in its own words, "seeks to source ideas and input to help make this a valuable resource" — a pilot lab arriving without a fixed agenda, asking the room what to point it at.

The middle of the day belonged to rice, in a three-hour block called This American Rice: the Jones family on their fifth-generation farm at England, Arkansas; a session on California rice and the Sacramento Valley; then a roundtable with Isbell Farms and Farmers' Rice Cooperative on "climate, costs, breeding, and what the future may hold for sake rice grown in the U.S." Issue five argued that rice is the hardest problem the American industry has. Friday gave it three hours and two farms.

Then the science. Lucas Smolic of the Sake Brewers Guild on the four enzymes that do the actual work inside a tank. Dr. Chiaki Takahashi of Islander Sake on maturation, under the title "Time as an Ingredient." And at four o'clock, Professor Hiroshi Takagi of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology proposing the SBANA Yeast Project — SBANA being the Sake Brewers Association of North America, the trade body for the American industry. The abstract describes "a collaborative initiative to discover, develop, and share unique North American yeasts for creating new styles for North American sake." The festival's own summary calls it a roadmap toward a North American sake yeast. Its premise is that those yeasts have not been found yet.

A roadmap toward a North American sake yeast.

Exactly one session was commerce. Timothy Sullivan of Hakkaisan broke down his brewery becoming the official sake partner of the Los Angeles Dodgers in March 2025 — a multi-year deal that, per the abstract, put custom-cup sake in concession stands, brand messaging on Dodger Vision and the Pavilion LED panels, and co-branded junmai daiginjo bottles — the top polishing grade — on Southern California retail shelves. He presented it across town from the deck the festival would open the following afternoon.

The last item on the schedule is the one we know least about. At six o'clock the North American Criterion held a closed tasting and roundtable for participating breweries only, at which the panel would lead "an open discussion of their observations from the evaluation," covering "both our successes and opportunities to collectively improve the sake made in North America." So there is a panel, and there was an evaluation. Past that sentence we have found nothing: not what the Criterion is, not who judged it, not which breweries entered, not what it concluded. We have written to SBANA to ask, and we will print what comes back. If you already know, tell us sooner.

SNOW-AGED GENSHU  ·  UONUMA, NIIGATA

Dr. Takahashi's title on Friday — time as an ingredient — describes this bottle exactly. Hakkaisan keeps a yukimuro, a snow room, at its site in Uonuma, one of the snowiest inhabited regions in Japan. Winter snow is packed into one half of an insulated building and sake tanks sit in the other. The snow alone holds the room at 3°C all year, with no electricity, no light and no vibration. Hakkaisan notes that storing goods in snow is old enough to appear in the Nihon Shoki, the eighth-century chronicle. This sake sat in there for three years.

What to call it is less settled than how it was made. The bottle itself reads 純米吟醸 — junmai ginjo. Hakkaisan's own page is headed "Snow Aged Junmai Daiginjo," opens by describing "this Junmai Ginjo Genshu sake," and sits at a web address that says ginjo. True Sake sells it as a junmai daiginjo from a page whose address also says ginjo. At 50 percent seimai buai — the polishing ratio, the share of each grain left after milling — it meets the daiginjo threshold either way, so the numbers settle it even where the labels don't. Genshu means undiluted: no water added at the end, which is where 17 percent alcohol comes from.

Nancy Matsumoto and Michael Tremblay choose it for the Snow Country flight in Rice, Water, Earth, describing it as smooth, rounded and creamy after its three years in the snow. True Sake, which sells it, goes further, and should be read as a retailer: "nougat, cooked apple tart, pear confit," honeydew and apricot, over a finish the shop calls snowmelt.

Where to buy: True Sake, $77 for 720ml, price and stock checked September 11, 2026. Also listed by Palate Project and Sunflower Sake.

Every wine label carries a line about sulfites. Sake carries none, because there are none. True Sake, the San Francisco shop that has been selling sake since 2003, states it flatly on its reference page: "There are no sulfites in sake."

What sake uses instead is heat. Hi-ire is pasteurization, and the standard bottle gets it twice. The job is the one sulfites do in wine — hold the contents steady on a shelf for a year or more. Skip it altogether and you have namazake, unpasteurized sake, which keeps changing in the bottle and has to stay cold the whole way from the brewery to the glass.

Do it once, and where you do it becomes a style. Namazume is pasteurized after brewing, stored, then bottled without a second pass. Nama-chozo is the reverse: stored raw, then pasteurized on the way out. True Sake files both as draft sake — steadier than a true nama, livelier than the standard two-pass bottle. That one decision, taken twice or once or not at all, accounts for most of the labels in a good shop's refrigerated case.

The technique is far older than the word for it. Matsumoto and Tremblay trace it to the monks of Shoryaku Temple in Nara, brewing commercially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who recorded heating their sake in a temple diary — centuries before Pasteur explained why it worked. The same monks worked out the three-stage mash and the practice of pressing the sake clear. Sake solved its shelf-life problem early, and it has never needed a chemical to do it.

A tōji is a brewery's master brewer, the person answerable for the whole brew. For most of sake's modern history the tōji did not work for the brewery. Brewing was confined to winter, so a tōji arrived each season at the head of a crew of kurabito — brewery hands from farming villages with no field work until spring — and left once the sake was made. Those crews organized into regional guilds, tōji ryūha, named for where their members came from: Nanbu, Echigo, Tanba, Noto. Matsumoto and Tremblay describe the guilds as functioning as unions and hiring halls. That system has largely gone. Brewing runs year-round now, staff are permanent, and the seasonal labor has dried up. What has replaced it at the most interesting breweries is the owner-tōji, where whoever owns the place also makes the sake — and Matsumoto and Tremblay argue that is precisely why the category has grown stranger and better, because an owner can afford a failed batch and a contractor cannot. Which should sound familiar: it is the same shape as the American founder-brewer, and it describes most of the people who poured on Saturday.