ISSUE 008  ·  SEPTEMBER 24, 2026

On Tuesday night we were on the patio at In Between Days in St. Petersburg for the bar's fifth birthday. The Esahm Malik Trio played under paper lanterns, and the AUX bar, the cool outdoor bar, was pouring. Noah Sain, the beverage director, and Yishi Li of the importer Sake Suki led a flight of three from Japan: Heiwa Shuzo's doburoku (a coarse, unfiltered sake), Abe Shuzo's Abe +, and Houou Biden's "Black Phoenix," a junmai ginjo.

World Sake Day is a week from today, October 1. The trade notes it as the start of the brewing season, and the calendar around it is full. Oakland, Brooklyn, Westborough, Denver, Charlottesville and Washington all have something on, and it's all in Last Call. Here at home the big one is Sake Block, Noah's new festival, with ten tastings on the $80 pass. We'll be there, and you'll get the report after.

This week: a brewery founded in 1487 and a Nashville brewer who wanted a drink nobody was making, a bottle from Tennessee, and what the yeast number on a label is telling you.

Last week we promised you more on Masaaki Saito. He is the twenty-seventh generation to run Hiraizumi Honpo, which has been brewing in Nikaho, Akita, between Mount Chōkai and the Sea of Japan, since 1487. How that ranks depends on who's counting. Bōken, its US importer, calls it Japan's second-oldest brewery on its website. Bōken's own 2024 launch announcement said third, and so does the brewery's own profile, which adds oldest in Tōhoku, Japan's northeast. The 1487 never moves.

Saito came home to the brewery in 2018. Since the 2023 brewing season, the brewery says, everything it makes has been yamahai, an old, slow way of starting a batch that waits on wild bacteria (Sake 101, below). When we met him in St. Petersburg this month, he gave two reasons. The brewery's water is hard, which is unusual in Japan, and he judged yamahai the method that suits it. And his grandfather, the twenty-fifth generation, had already pointed the brewery that way. He keeps his yamahai lighter than the style's heavy reputation, because that is where younger drinkers are going.

Byron Stithem had no grandfather's brewery. He opened Proper Sake Co. in Nashville in 2017 and built it on the same old methods; the brewery calls itself a specialist in kimoto and yamahai. His reason, as he told the podcast Sake Revolution in 2021: "if I wanted to drink yamahai sake, the only way it was going to happen is if I made it." He now pours it at two bars of his own, Rice Vice in East Nashville and New Orleans.

Same method, reached from opposite ends. In Akita it is an inheritance a young brewer chose to keep and push further. In Nashville it was a thirst with nobody around to satisfy it.

Where to buy: Bōken sells Hiraizumi's No. 77 on its own site at $53.99. We could not confirm which states it ships to, checked September 24, 2026.

YAMAHAI GINJO  ·  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

The Diplomat was the first sake Proper put into distribution, and Stithem has said the brewery's names have kept a diplomatic theme ever since. It is also a moving target. The recipe has changed between releases, and the brewery doesn't publish the specs. The latest on record are Stithem's own, given live on Sake Revolution in October 2023: Titan rice from Isbell Farms in Arkansas, the same farm that grows Origami's rice, milled to 55 percent, a sake meter value of +2 (just off dry), Kyokai No. 7 yeast, and nama, meaning unpasteurized. Today's label says only yamahai ginjo, 16 to 18 percent alcohol.

On that 2023 episode, Timothy Sullivan found "quite a bit of fruitiness on the nose" and John Puma the earthiness he treats as yamahai's signature; Stithem's own read was "very overripe tropical fruit." Proper's label copy is one line of wordplay: "a masterclass in rice-based diplomacy and fermentation tradecraft."

Where to buy: in St. Petersburg, Neighborhood Wine Shop on Central Avenue lists it at $33, checked September 24, 2026; stock is thin, so call ahead. Anywhere else, ask your sake shop to order it in.

Some sake labels print the yeast, usually as a number: Kyokai No. 7, Kyokai No. 77. Kyokai means association, and the association is the Brewing Society of Japan, which has sold pure-culture brewing yeast since 1906. About two dozen numbered strains are on its lists today, most of them first isolated from a single brewery's tanks. No. 6 came from Aramasa in Akita around 1930 and is the oldest still sold. No. 7 came from Masumi in Nagano in 1946 and is the most widely used; Masumi calls it the most used sake yeast in the world.

A yeast makes the alcohol, but it also shapes much of the aroma and the acid, and the number is how a brewer chooses. Hiraizumi Honpo gives the cleanest demonstration we've seen. Its Nana and its No. 77 are both junmai ginjo, both milled to 60 percent. Nana uses No. 7 and lists an acidity of 1.9. No. 77 uses Kyokai No. 77 and lists 3.6. The Brewing Society's own description of No. 77, a mutant strain released in 1993, explains the gap. It makes 1.0 to 1.5 points more acid than No. 7, most of it malic acid, and two to three times the ethyl caproate, the compound behind the apple-like perfume of many ginjo.

So the number tells you what the brewer was after. It is not a grade. The Diplomat, this week's One Bottle, used No. 7 as well, by Stithem's 2023 figures.

Every sake begins with a small starter batch that grows the yeast, and the starter needs acid to keep bad bacteria out. The old way, kimoto, got that acid from wild lactic bacteria, after brewers pounded rice and koji (rice grown with the mold that turns starch into sugar) into a paste with long poles. In 1909, Kagi Kin'ichirō at Japan's government brewing research station showed the pounding could be skipped. That shortcut is yamahai, short for yamaoroshi haishi moto, "the starter that stopped the pounding." It still waits on wild bacteria, which takes about a month. Most sake today uses sokujō, which adds lactic acid directly and takes about two weeks. Japan's sake makers' association says yamahai tends to be full-bodied.