This Is Tamagawa Sake 木下酒造 玉川: Could Japan's Most Groundbreaking Sake Be Made By An English Teacher From Birmingham? How An Unlikely Outsider Revived Ancient Recipes, Removed Yeast, And Added Time And Temperature To The Formula

If there had to be a singular insider's Sake that had nothing to do with how inaccessible or how difficult it was to get hands on, but instead squared centrally on just how innovative the Sakes are - and that's not to be taken as being unique for the sake of it - it indisputably has to be Tamagawa Sake (玉川). The Kyoto-based Tamagawa Sake from Kinoshita Shuzo in fact focuses on the use of ancestral Sake-making methods from the use of spontaneous yeasts via the Kimoto or Yamahai methods of producing the yeast starter, to the multi-year ageing of Sake before release, to which it executes with the utmost precision and craftsmanship. What then might be rather surprising is that its toji (the head brewer) is the Birmingham-born, Cornwall-raised and Oxford-educated British Philip Harper, who also happens to be the first non-Japanese to be appointed a full fledged toji by Japan's illustrious yet somewhat mythical toji guild.

Founded in 1842 along the coast of Kumihama Bay, right at the western tip of the furthest reaches of northern Kyoto in Kyotango, Kinoshita Shuzo (木下酒造) was founded by 5th-generation Zenbee Kinoshita, and today remains in the hands of the 11th-generation Kinoshita, Yoshito, who continues to lead the family-owned brewery. Yet, much of what Kinoshita Shuzo is known for today - the cult followed Tamagawa brand, its name translating as Jewel River (玉 tama to mean "jewel", and 川 gawa to mean "river"), a tribute to the polished pebbles in the Kawakamidani River that flows by the brewery - really begins in 2007, which is the year that highly lauded Brit Sake brewer Philip Harper was appointed as the brewery's toji and thus marks also the brewery's modern reinvention.

As the story goes, Kinoshita Shuzo's longstanding toji of 46 years had abruptly passed away and the historic brewery was itself not in great shape, both operationally and financially, as it stared down a nationwide multi-decade decline in Sake consumption, armed with only outdated equipment and archaic processes. It was at that point that Yoshito Kinoshita had begun to seriously consider the prospect of closing his family's brewery for good, after all he was hardly the first or even few who would have done so. It was then that Kinoshita-san's close friend would put him in touch with Harper, insisting that Kinoshita-san not allow generations of his family's work to fade away. On the flipside, Harper at the time had already spent close to two decades in Japan, having trained for a decade at the Umenoyado Brewery in Nara, before subsequently passing the highly rigorous and prestigious Nanbu Toji certification as the first foreigner to do so, upon which he had already served as a toji for another brewery for another half a decade by that point, and was thus more than qualified to take on the role of master brewer at Kinoshita Shuzo. Having amassed significant experience in Sake-making, Harper had fortuitously been looking to leave his then brewery in Osaka, and had thus asked a mutual friend of Kinoshita-san's who was in the brewing equipments business for any leads on a brewery looking for a toji, which thus became a moment of serendipity that connected Harper to Kinoshita-san - a partnership that has lasted for close to two decades now.

"I didn’t know a word of Japanese when I arrived. It was awkward in the staffroom, because the teachers and I could hardly communicate at all. But then one day we went to a party, and they kept saying, Ma, dozo dozo, filling each other’s sake cups. The cups are tiny, so I heard them say it a lot! That’s when I realized that serving each other sake is one way for Japanese people to get on the same wavelength. If there’s Sake, there’s no need for elaborate conversation. That was a reassuring discovery for me!"

But wait, just how did a Brit even find himself at the heart - and really the pinnacle - of one of Japan's most traditional and deeply held crafts? Born in 1966 in Birmingham, England, Harper had completed a degree in English Literature at Oxford University, whereupon graduating he would make his way to Osaka, Japan, via the JET Program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, a highly popular cross-border arrangement that has allowed many of Japan's foreign residents to live in the country), teaching English in junior and high schools for the next two years. By Harper's own account, "I think the first ever time I tasted Sake was the same day I tasted Japanese food: on the plane on the way to Japan in 1988. When I got here, I became friends with two Japanese guys because of a shared taste in music. We started going to Sake tastings and brewery visits and rice planting and things like that, and the short version of the story is that we all gave up our jobs and became sake brewers." Once the program was over, Harper would extend his stay in Japan by continuing to teach at local language schools, as well as working nights at the local pub, all the whilst deepening his fascination with Sake having found there to be incredible diversity in the drink. When a friend had gotten a job at the Umenoyado Brewery in the Nara Prefecture, Harper would offer to help out, and eventually snuck himself in entirely. The early, formative years would see Harper serve as a general labour before spending a year each on processing raw grain (of milling, polishing and bagging the rice), preparing the rice for brewing (steaming it), and finally cultivating the most important ingredient of all, the koji (the culture that turns rice starch to fermentable sugars). Harper would spend the next decade working the full brewing season.

After years served at the brewery, Harper was enrolled by the brewery's owner into formal Sake brewing classes and would himself marry a Japanese, the ceremony of which Harper often muses was his single only day off during his decade at Umenoyado Brewery. By 2001, Harper would enroll into the highly revered Nanbu Brewer's Guild Exam, which he would pass and thus had earned himself the credit of being the first ever non-Japanese to hold the title. Harper attributes much of his proficiency to the toji training system, which he often cites as imbuing its apprentices with an understanding of the importance of working in harmony with the entire brewing team, truly understanding what is most critical in Sake-making, as well as the proper traditional methods of brewing. Upon passing the rigorous exam, Harper would go on to work at various breweries in Osaka, Ibaraki and Kyoto, including the highly respected Daimon Brewery. He would also author several acclaimed books on the subject matter, including The Insider's Guide To Sake and The Book Of Sake: A Connoisseurs Guide, which have gone on to become must-reads for anyone interested in Japan's most famous beverage. With more than two decades in, Harper would eventually meet Kinoshita-san, where he would find his home for the next two decades, which would also become the place where he would build a legendary reputation for both himself and the brewery.

When Harper had first arrived at Kinoshita Shuzo in 2007, the brewery had primarily only sold its Sakes to customers that lived no further than a 5 mile radius from the brewery - this was a major concern perhaps hiding in plain sight considering the brewery's own remote location. On top of that, the brewery's workers had been held to the gruelling routine of having no days off during the brewing season as was common across breweries, with then also outdated machinery and its Sakes increasingly losing relevance and appeal to its drinkers. It was clear that the traditional ways, unsurprising given the brewery's long history and single lineage of family ownership, in which the brewery worked was no longer tenable. With the support of Kinoshita-san, Harper would quickly get to work overhauling the entire brewery, from securing days off for the team (although he himself continues to take no days off during the brewing season) which quickly boosted morale, to acquiring new equipment and of course setting about designing new and unique Sake that would find more customers nationwide and even perhaps beyond Japan's shores. For Harper, two of the most interesting and also under-explored aspects of Sake-making was the use of time and temperature, with also the belief that it was time for ancestral Sake-making methods to be revived after decades of industrial production. 

This meant producing producing Sakes with nothing more than rice, koji and water - noticeably cultured yeast is absent - using the ancestral methods of Yamahai and Kimoto, both of which involve time intensive and laborious efforts to spur the spontaneous inoculation of wild ambient yeasts residing in the brewery into a starter that would subsequently be used to drive fermentation. In the case of Kimoto, this involves the manual work of the brewers in continuously pounding rice and water until it begins to bubble and react! Because the entire process is spontaneous, there is no certainty that inoculation will take place or would take place with consistency, therefore giving the Sakes a wilder side with more character and variability, as opposed to the more commonly used cultured yeast which is a sure guarantee. Yet by doing so, with then what the brewery terms the "3U' (Unfiltered, Unpasteurised, Undiluted), the Sake produced is more robust and is able to achieve a much higher positive double digit SMV rating (that is Sake Meter Value, which measures the Sake's density compared to water; a high positive SMV rating means more alcohol and less sugar, that is more dry in taste), with also much higher acidity - Tamagawa's Sakes readily top 20% ABV (most Sakes sit at 13-16% ABV)!

Tamagawa also brews a special Myaa Junmai Ginjo in honour of the brewery's cat Myaa that came to the brewery as a stray in 2008 and had served as its mascot for 17 years before passing. Myaa was beloved by Tamagawa's customers who would often spot him at the brewery store, and thus every bottle of Myaa sold comes with a donation to the local cat welfare charity.

Furthermore Harper insisted on the inclusion of ancestral Omachi rice (in fact, Japan's oldest Sake rice) alongside the more renowned Gohyakumangoku and Yamadanishiki varieties. From there, some of these Sake will then be aged in Tamagawa's warehouse, mostly at room temperature with some refrigerated, typically for about 3 years before they are released. This allows Tamagawa to produce Sake styles that ranges from Fresh to Maturing and finally Well-Aged, with some of its most famous expressions including Ice Breaker that is a summer Sake designed to be served over ice and evolves with the temperature, the Spontaneous Fermentation series which showcases the Yamahai and Kimoto brewing techniques, and arguably its most acclaimed of all, the Time Machine 1712 which has been aged at room temperature for 3 years before release. That Tamagawa leaves so much of its brewing to nature is a testament to the sheer boldness of its brewers!

While much of Tamagawa's Sakes may seem unusual or unconventional, they are, as Harper likes to point out, in fact often based on ancient recipes or long forgotten techniques that pre-date much of the world as we know today, from a time before refrigeration where Sake was only brewed in winter and stored through the year, often having to be transported over long voyages, and perhaps most interestingly, before today's social conventions around enjoying Sake. “We make sake like it was made 200 years ago. We don’t add pure yeast, we age some of the Sakes for years, we don’t pasteurise. If you parachuted in some sake maker from 300 years ago, he would understand what we’re doing here – apart from the electricity," explains Harper. Kinoshita Shuzo further states, "It is often said that Sake is at its peak when, and best drunk, young. However, we at Tamagawa think of freshly pressed sake, fun though it can be, as simply the starting point of each sake’s journey. Tamagawa Sake is [thus] a work in process." This therefore underscores Tamagawa's ethos of celebrating impermanence, which is the very philosophy that has garnered its Sake such fame with Sake lovers around the world. And even in this very niche style of Sake-making, Tamagawa finds room for a regional identity, with the brewery explaining that its choice to allow its Sake to be aged in room temperature in a deliberate act to imbue it with terroir expression where the Sake is able to reflect its provenance - if it were instead aged refrigerated, then every other brewery would be able to achieve the same controlled temperature and thus produce a similar profile of Sake!

Consequently, Tamagawa likes to say that its Sakes are once in a lifetime, atypically durable and can offer a long lasting experience with its last glass even better than the first from the very same bottle as it continues to age in once opened, dynamic in its ability to display different flavour profiles over a wide range of temperatures, and finally is also a bid to rewrite the standard Sake rulebook, all whilst being rooted in traditional craftsmanship. Tamagawa's Sake are thus in many ways a chameleon, as the brewery calls it. To reflect its unique Sakes, Kinoshita-san's brother-in-law, Sakane Katsusuke, a famous Japanese artist, was asked to create a new logo for the brewery, to which he would present a marutama that was drawn with thick brushstrokes in a style that was nevertheless bold and edgy, reflecting an intersection of heritage and creativity. This would be coupled with a conspicuous sticker over each Sake expression stating a vintage year, followed by the BY (or Brewing Year), which tells the consumer the year in which the Tamagawa Sake was made, going beyond the standard "Production Date" which all Sakes carry that only tells of the date at which the Sake goes out the brewery.

Now if you thought any of this radical changes were easy, Harper is quick to tell you otherwise, saying "One of the things I like to do, and one that the boss has learned to love to do, is age Sake. A lot of our pasteurized Sake we ship after two or three years in the bottle. To the banks, that looks like you've got a load of dead stock. For the first few years, the boss had to have conversations with the bank about what he was doing with all the stock. But as those products came online and started selling and selling, the banks figured it out. We have two to three times the stock that most breweries of this size would have, but the banks have realized that it's all going to be ringing up on the cash registers eventually." And before you get concerned about Harper being a key man risk, the cult Japanese Sake brewer from Birmingham is here to assure you, "There are a lot of different stages of Sake brewing and they are all complicated and deep and interesting in their own way. Then there's the problem of how they all mesh together. As I said, I turned some jobs over in the first year, but the fermenting mash is a little trickier. The most difficult thing of all to explain is koji, which is really the heart of the matter for us. If I should die, business will go on as usual here, but the one thing I haven't really trained people up to the point where I can just say 'get on with it' is the koji. It's so difficult to put into words; you can't quantify it. But I am moving things a step forward in that that direction this season. In another year or two I'll be completely superfluous and then I'll know I've done my job."