ISSUE 001  ·  JULY 2, 2026

Welcome to the first issue. This is a weekly letter about craft sake — the Americans who have started brewing it, and the Japanese who have been at it for centuries.

Here is the fact that started it. There are more sake breweries operating in the United States than in any country on earth except Japan. Not more than France, or Australia, which you might have guessed. More than anywhere. And almost nobody who drinks sake knows it.

Nobody planned that. It happened because of a Japanese tax law written in the wreckage of a war, and that story is below.

First, a bottle. A sake newsletter with no sake in it is just homework.

JUNMAI NAMA  ·  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Named for the blue door at the entrance of Brooklyn Kura's taproom, which is a reasonable place for this newsletter to start.

Calrose and Yamada Nishiki rice, both grown in Arkansas, milled to 70 percent. 17% ABV, +3 on the sake meter, which puts it on the dry side. It's a nama — unpasteurized, meaning it skipped the heat treatment nearly every other bottle gets. That leaves it livelier and shorter-lived. Serve it cold and don't let it sit open.

The brewery describes it as "full bodied, earthy, dry, umami-laden with subtle notes of banana and ripe melon," and says it ferments warmer than their ginjo, which is what makes it stout rather than delicate.

Where to buy: 750ml for $33 at Palate Project, the retailer that was Tippsy until this April. 375ml for $20 direct from the brewery. Prices checked July 2, 2026.

Worth noticing where the rice is from. Umami Mart's Yoko Kumano reported in April 2025 that Brooklyn Kura is one of several American breweries buying from Isbell Farms in England, Arkansas — a family farm growing real Yamada Nishiki, the variety Japanese brewers prize above all others. More on them in a coming issue.

Someone is almost certainly brewing sake closer to you than you think.

Moto-i has been doing it in Minneapolis since 2008. Brooklyn Kura since 2018. There is Sequoia in San Francisco, Arizona Sake in Holbrook, Origami in Hot Springs, Proper in Nashville, North American Sake in Charlottesville, Ben's in Asheville, Islander in Hawaii, and more arriving every year. Add the Japanese-owned American plants and the total runs past thirty operations across twenty-two states.

A word on that number, because we'll be using it a lot. There is no official census of American sake, and every published count disagrees, because nobody says what they're counting. Ours: 28 craft producers and 7 Japanese-owned American facilities currently brewing, in 22 states, with 11 more in planning. When it changes, we'll say so.

None of this was planned. It happened because in Japan, you cannot simply decide to open a sake brewery.

The relevant text is Article 10, Item 11 of the Liquor Tax Law, which lets the authorities refuse a manufacturing license when they judge it necessary to keep supply and demand in balance. Applied to sake, that has meant almost no new domestic licenses for generations. The exceptions are narrow: an existing producer building a replacement facility, or an operation brewing strictly for export.

The reasoning made sense once. Before the Second World War, liquor tax was the single largest source of national revenue in Japan. As late as 1950 it was still close to a fifth of the entire national tax take. Today it is around two percent. Rice was scarce, between military demand and drought, and the government controlled how much each brewery was allowed to make.

Those controls came off one at a time. Official sake pricing ended in 1963. Production quotas went in 1974. The grading system was abolished in 1989. The licensing restriction stayed exactly where it was.

Which left a Japanese person who wanted to brew sake with two options. Buy a kura that already existed, or leave.

In the United States there is no equivalent rule. So they came, and Americans joined them.

Japan noticed. Hakkaisan took a stake in Brooklyn Kura in 2021. Dassai spent eighty million dollars on a brewery in Hyde Park, New York, and opened it in 2023.

Then, in 2025, sake went the other way. Brooklyn Kura became the first US-owned and operated sake brewery to export to Japan — three bottlings, sold through Hakkaisan, in the country the whole thing came from. The volume was, by Brian Polen's own account, relatively small. We'll take that story apart properly in issue three, because how it actually happened is better than the headline.

Here is the part almost nobody has connected. Three months later, in June 2025, the Japanese government said it was considering issuing new domestic sake licenses for the first time in decades. The numbers behind that are grim: breweries down to around fifteen hundred, less than half the historic peak, and sales in fiscal 2022 at roughly a quarter of their 1975 level. A government working group is being convened, and several regions — among them Shimane, Hiroshima, Fukushima and Akita — have applied for special zones that would let new breweries open.

The rule that pushed sake overseas may not outlive the decade. But the breweries it produced are already here, most of them closer to you than you think, and what they are making is worth your attention now rather than later.

Sources: SAKE Street on Article 10 and the special-zone applications; SAKETIMES on the 2019 export-only change; Asia News Network, June 2025, on the proposed domestic relaxation; The Japan Times and BevNET on the Brooklyn Kura export; brewery counts from our own database, compiled from the TTB permit register, SBANA's member directory and state licensing records.

A kura (蔵) is a storehouse, and in sake it means the brewery itself. Once you know the word you start seeing it everywhere: Brooklyn Kura, Sango Kura, sakagura. The people who work inside one are kurabito. Our name means the brewery next door, which in America used to be a joke and increasingly isn't.