ISSUE 005  ·  SEPTEMBER 3, 2026

This Saturday, seventeen American sake breweries pour side by side on an open-air deck in West LA. The American Craft Sake Fest bills itself as the largest gathering of the North American sake industry in the country, and for one night a year the whole movement is in one room.

Issue four promised you a Japanese kura (a sake brewery) and a sommelier this week. Both are coming. But a festival landing two days after this does takes the anchor slot, and the kura moves to next issue.

Alongside it: a doburoku from Covina brewed on organic California rice, why rice is the thing keeping American brewers up at night, and a month of dates.

DOBUROKU  ·  COVINA, CALIFORNIA

Doburoku (どぶろく) is sake that never got pressed — the whole fermented rice mash, cloudy and thick, the way it was drunk before anyone had the tools to clarify it. This one is a commission. Sunflower Sake, the Portland shop that pours what it calls the only American craft sake flight in the country, asked Nova Brewing in Covina for a doburoku on organic rice, and got one: Luna Koshihikari, a no-till organic table rice from California, polished to only 90 percent, which is to say barely at all.

Nova's James Jin says the style took him about four years of trial and error, working from a bottle he'd loved at Tokyo Port Brewery while training in Japan. The difficulty, by his account, was Calrose — California's standard sake rice is harder than Japanese sake rice and breaks down less readily, and doburoku needs the rice to break down more than a premium sake does. It's brewed in a single stage rather than the usual three, pasteurized once, and carbonated naturally in a pressure-rated bottle.

The tasting note is Nina Murphy's, Sunflower's founder, who commissioned it and sells it, so read it as an enthusiastic retailer's: "Mango, pineapple, creamy, tropical, and a touch sweet," with "freshness and high acidity." Nova doesn't publish a sake meter value or acidity figure — house policy, they say — and we'd rather print that than guess.

Where to buy: Sunflower Sake, $36 for 500ml, $30 flat shipping per case to states that allow it. Price checked September 2, 2026. Bottled January 26, 2026. Sunflower's own warning is worth repeating: chill it to near freezing and open it slowly, because even pasteurized it's lively. Nova is pouring at the festival Saturday if you'd rather taste first.

Saturday, September 5, Lumen West LA, an outdoor deck in Sawtelle Japantown at 11355 W Olympic Blvd. VIP entry at 3, general admission at 4, doors close at 8. More than a hundred sakes, most of them poured by the people who made them, plus seminars, a live bluefin tuna cutting, and a DJ. The Sake Brewers Association of North America (SBANA), the trade body for the American industry, runs it; the hosts are Sawtelle Sake, the nonprofit Story Boldly, and Yama Sushi Marketplace; proceeds go to SBANA and Story Boldly.

The number that matters is the pour list. Twenty-eight producers and importers are pouring, and seventeen of them are American craft breweries that make their sake in the United States: Ben's American Sake, Brooklyn Kura, Den Sake, Farthest Star, Islander, moto-i, Narumi Craft Sake, North American Sake Brewery, Nova Brewing, Proper Sake, SakéOne, Sango Kura, Sawtelle Sake, Sequoia Sake, Shojo, The Void, and Tsuki. Add Dassai Blue and Gekkeikan, the two Japanese-owned operations also pouring, brewing in New York and California, and it's nineteen brewed-in-America names on one deck. There's no other night in the calendar where you can taste that many of them side by side.

Read the sponsor list and a second story shows up. JFC and Wismettac, two of the largest Japanese-food importers in the country, are paying to sponsor an American craft sake festival — neither listed an American sake in its catalog when we last checked in late August. Palate Project, the Los Angeles retailer, added Sawtelle Sake's bottles to its shelf this summer and now sits on the same masthead as Sawtelle, the host. Nova joined SBANA in August and went straight onto the pour list. The people who move bottles are turning up at the brewers' own party.

When the importers start showing up at the brewers' party, that's the market moving.

Two things you can do without a ticket. The silent auction is open to anyone and closes at 7 p.m. Pacific on Saturday. And if you're in the trade, Friday's Industry Day — VIP access only — has Farmers' Rice Cooperative presenting with Iida Group on growing and milling sake rice, which is the subject of the next section.

Tickets as of Wednesday: the $100 early bird is sold out, general admission is $120 and marked "almost gone," VIP is $250 and marked limited. 21 and over, validated parking $10. We'll have what got poured, and what the auction fetched, next week.

Most of the rice in American sake is grown in America. SBANA says so plainly, and the festival's sponsor list backs it up: all three of the association's rice-growing members — Isbell Farms in Arkansas, Sun Valley Rice and Farmers' Rice Cooperative in California — are sponsoring Saturday, along with USA Rice, the industry's trade group. Rice farmers have a booth at a sake festival. Here's why.

The default grain is Calrose, a medium-grain California table rice. It's what Nova mills to 50 percent for its clear sake. Matsumoto and Tremblay, in Rice, Water, Earth, trace it back to seed Japanese immigrants brought to California in 1905, so it has the lineage. What it doesn't have is the build. Sake rice proper — sakamai, the hundred-odd strains bred for brewing in Japan — has a bigger grain, a well-defined starchy core, and less protein and fat in the outer layers. Brewers want the starch and mill the rest away. A table rice makes that harder, and James Jin at Nova says Calrose is simply harder than Japanese sake rice and slower to break down.

Jake Myrick, co-founder of Sequoia Sake in San Francisco, put it bluntly in a member profile SBANA published this summer: "Rice is my biggest headache right now. The way the farming of rice is going, they're pushing more protein and that doesn't work for sake." His response has been to fund a small lab with a research geneticist testing thirty rice varieties, aiming for one California farmers will agree to grow. He has been at this a while: Sequoia was licensed in 2019 to grow Caloro, the 1905 rice under another name, and bottled a sake from it in 2021. UC Davis, he notes, covers beer, wine, spirits and mead, "but they currently don't do anything for sake."

There is American-grown sake rice. Isbell Farms grows Yamada Nishiki — the benchmark Japanese sake rice — in Arkansas, and it's in the Origami bottles from issues one through three. Per Matsumoto and Tremblay, Isbell also keeps a plot of Wataribune, the 1905 seed itself, that brewers so far haven't asked for. Sun Valley grows Yamada Nishiki in the Sacramento Valley. The Nova doburoku above goes the other way and uses a table rice, Koshihikari, barely milled, on purpose. That range, from a 90 percent polish on table rice to a 40 percent polish on Arkansas Yamada Nishiki, is what the American scene looks like right now: the rice question isn't settled, and Friday's seminar is the industry working on it in public.

Doburoku (どぶろく) is the oldest form of sake: fermented rice that was never pressed or filtered, so you drink the mash, grains and all. It's thicker and usually sweeter than nigori (coarsely filtered, cloudy sake), and lower in alcohol. Nigori itself is a workaround — Matsumoto and Tremblay record that Kyoto's Masuda Tokubee Shoten coined it in 1964 for a coarsely filtered doburoku the law wouldn't otherwise let them sell. In Japan, as Nova explains it, the law reserves the word seishu — "clear sake" — for pressed sake, so doburoku can't be called that there, and only a handful of licensed breweries may make it at all. Under US rules any Japanese-style rice brew is sake, which is why an American brewery can sell it as one. Serve it very cold, and open it slowly.