“[It's] like taking care of a living thing. It takes so much attention.”

–Reuben Luke Oh, Founder CEO at Orchid Sake Brewery on brewing sake

On a Sunday afternoon in Jurong, while most of Singapore is off the clock, the loading bays of a food-processing estate are still grinding: trucks reversing, workers hauling crates, the machinery of a city that never quite stops feeding itself. Somewhere inside one of these industrial units, behind a door that gives nothing away, Reuben Luke Oh asks me to remove my shoes.

I step into a pair of guest slippers to enter the unit. Then, a few paces later, another set of taped lines on the ground with instructions. We put on a hairnet and switch to a second pair of slippers to enter the brewing hall. It is the same kind of protocol you encounter in sake breweries across Japan's snow country, where contamination is the enemy and the rituals are centuries old. Except this is not Niigata. This is a repurposed craft-beer facility in an industrial park, and the man enforcing the slipper change is a 31-year-old Singaporean who taught himself to brew sake on the job.

This is Orchid Sake Brewery, and Reuben and his partner Yumika Yamamoto are building something Singapore has not had before. Not only is this Singapore's first and only sake brewery, it is also, by Reuben's own cheerful admission, probably the only one in the world running on inherited beer tanks with their lids sawn off, dim sum steamers repurposed for sake rice, and a pressing system weighted down with gym plates. There’s probably no other brewery in the world like this.

He tells me later, grinning, "They call this the MacGyver style." It is funny, and it is admirable. You can hear the subtext: if you want to do something no one has done here, you do not wait for the perfect equipment to arrive with a ribbon on it. You start with what you can get, and you build competence around it.

The sudden roar of the industrial cooler briefly blots out our words mid-sentence. When it finally dips, Reuben points out that the fermentation tanks came from the previous occupant – craft beer brewer Off Day Beer Co. Instead of relying on air-conditioning alone, Reuben explains that the tanks are cooled by glycol, a coolant that pulls heat out of the fermenting sake through the steel walls. As the yeast and our tropical heat warms the tank, the glycol carries that heat away and returns cold again, keeping the temperature tightly controlled.

You can look at the vats from the ground and see only gleaming steel, but if you climb the step ladder and peer over, you see a very dense eggshell-white slurry looking right at you, its surface broken by small bubbles and a faint foam as yeast works through the rice.

Reuben speaks about the moromi the way someone would talk about their beloved pet. At first it sounds like brewer’s poetry, but you then realise it describes exactly what he’s been doing. “Because taking care of them is like taking care of a living thing. It takes so much attention,” he says. “Imagine having a newborn every month. It’s like the same level of attention you have to give.”

Now, in beer, your workflow comes in a straight line. Malted grain arrives already primed, carrying enzymes that create fermentable sugars. Just heat it with water, hold it in the right range, and you’ve made a mash from which you extract the sugary wort ready for fermentation.

Sake refuses to be that tidy. Rice does not break down its own starch the way malt does. You can’t simply mash it and expect sweetness to appear. You first have to give rice the power to become sugar at all, by introducing a mould: koji. And koji is its own two-day negotiation with biology. In Orchid Brewery’s koji room, the walls are steel and aluminium with a large wooden table for steamed rice, built for hygiene and sprayed-down practicality. Reuben says it plainly: “In Japan, you’d be using humidifiers. Here [in Singapore], we need dehumidifiers to bring it down from 80 to 90% to about 60 to 70%.”

Muslin cloths to help rice retain its heat when inoculated with koji spores. 

The inoculated rice gives off its own heat as the mould takes hold, and it gets feral. “The amount of heat generated,” said Reuben, “the room becomes like 40 degrees [celcius].” Did they have to ever spend the night in the brewery? “Sometimes when making koji,” Yumika says, almost casually. “Oh yeah, it’s 48 hours straight,” confirmed Reuben. The brewers must monitor temperature constantly. Too warm, and you have to break up clumps of rice to release trapped heat. Too cool, and they raise the temperature using heaters. It cannot be left alone for long.

Only then do we get to the fermentation stage, with these open tanks we’re looking down into. In beer, starch conversion would have been finished, and alcohol fermentation begins. In sake, however, the process doesn’t separate itself into clean stages. Sugar is created and consumed at the same time. The mould’s enzymes continue to turn rice starch into sugar while yeast is simultaneously turning that sugar into alcohol. This is the moromi, a living overlap: production and consumption happening in the same breath. The brewers have to continue monitoring its progress, especially during the first few days.

On fermentation timelines, Reuben shares that the flagship uTama Tropic or Classic Junmai Daiginjo take about 30 to 33 days. Then he gestures to the current tank. “For the uTama Royal… I can’t tell you exactly yet because it’s too early. It’s probably going to hit 40 days, I think.”

While their flagship sakes are brewed with 50% polished Yamada Nishiki rice, the uTama Royal 35% is their up-and-coming premium Junmai Daiginjo brewed with 35% polished Kitashizuku rice from Hokkaido. That means only the innermost 35% of each rice grain remains after milling. Highly polished rice sakes tend to reward gentler handling and slower development - refined aromatics are allowed to form without being overwhelmed by rough edges. It is more expensive to make, both in raw material and in the time it occupies a tank.

The need for monitoring data is constant. Yumika climbs the step ladder to draw off a sample of the moromi – sharing that she is measuring its Brix level (sugar), acidity and alcohol percentage. Reuben chimes in: “The crazy thing is that unlike beer brewing, we can’t use a hydrometer because there is no present sugar at the beginning. There’s only potential sugar from the starch”. To track these overlapping processes accurately, they invested in an Anton Paar refractometer, a $22,000 instrument that can read through the noise and show what’s actually changing in the tank.

And then, above all this stainless steel, glycol piping, and improvised engineering, there is a small detail that makes the brewery feel unindustrial. On the second floor of the brewery, a small Shinto-style workplace shrine perches up high. “Oh, that’s from Ise Jingu, from the national shrine of Japan,” Reuben says. It is a dedication to Amaterasu, the supreme deity of Shintoism, and more importantly, to Toyouke, the deity of agriculture and grain.

Here, in a Jurong industrial unit, it is compact and almost understated. Less elaborate than what you might see in a Japanese workplace. But it is deliberate. We’ve spent two hours talking about monitoring heat curves, yeast stress, Brix levels and fermentation length, about modified dim sum steamers and expensive equipment to ensure they could make the best sake they possibly can. This isn’t a plea for divine intervention, but a respect for lineage inside a hyper-modern setting.

“For me, it’s a necessity,” said Reuben, with simple, habitual respect rather than performance. “If you’re bringing this craft out of the country, you need something to connect back to it.”

We had a chance to taste four of the brewery’s products, all served as nama in SKLO tasting glasses.

Their bestseller, the uTama Tropic Junmai Daiginjo makes its intentions obvious without being loud. It’s got a beautiful floral lift at the top, clean and airy, anchored by a rice-derived umami. On the palate bright and energetic, with a springy, forward momentum rather than a soft glide. Tropical notes of pineapple and ripe orchard fruits carry through on a clean, balanced acidity. This sake was specially tuned towards stronger flavours and bolder food pairings for the local Singaporean palate. I immediately think of chicken rice. This is a sake that would stand its ground beside Peranakan dishes and probably European plates that lean into butter, roast or reduction.

The uTama Classic Junmai Daiginjo compliments more delicate Japanese cuisine. The nose is floral and rice-forward, cleaner and more composed, with an almond-like nuttiness. On the palate precise and layered, held in a neat line: green apple at the centre, a gentle rounding of sweetness and then a small, bright brush of citrus zest and a crisp karakuchi impression. This is the one I keep returning to.

The uTama Native Junmai Daiginjo is the most intriguing of the core range. Brewed with sake rice and an additional batch of Black Sarawak glutinous rice, it takes on a striking berry-red hue. Remarkably, this works really well. It drinks like a high-quality junmai sake, with the same underlying clarity and structure, but the black rice folds in extra dimensions: suggestion of berries, a pulut hitam-like coconut note and a light roasty character. This is really solid – it’s not mere novelty.

The last pour is their limited-edition craft sake, Hop Play, a hops-steeped Junmai Daiginjo made using water steeped with Cascade hops from Asobi Beer Brewery in North Kyoto. The aromas are familiar to beer drinkers: juicy grapefruit, pine and bright tropical notes from fresh hops. On the palate though, keeps its footing as good sake, with a clean core and a polished, rice-driven softness. It reads less like sake pretending to be beer, more like sake widening its frame of reference.

These sakes are undeniably very high quality. If I had been handed these blind, I would not be able to say they didn’t come from another 180-year-old brewery in Niigata. Reuben and Yumika are proving that sake can be brewed properly in Singapore at a serious level, without inherited infrastructure, without precedent and without softening the ambition to fit the constraints.

The MacGyver ingenuity is easy to admire. The why is harder. I asked Reuben, when did the problem stop being equipment and feasibility, and became purpose? Why brew sake in Singapore at all?

“That’s a good question. I don’t really know,” he admits. “I think the craziness of it just kept the momentum.” Only in hindsight does it resolve into something clearer. He talks about how much he was travelling around Japan, seeing breweries up close, and how the admiration built until it became a dare he could not quite put down. “It sounds really cheesy,” he says, “but I really appreciate and love what they do there. I wanted to take up the challenge as well.”

“Now I finally understand why [Japanese brewers] all look so grumpy as well,” Reuben joked. He describes it as a job that takes everything out of you. “It’s a crazy job. It requires a lot of physical work, mental work and drains the hell out of you.”

And if there is a reason Orchid Sake Brewery exists in Singapore, it is not because its team arrived as masters with a perfected playbook. Reuben is candid about that too. Yumika carries much of the technical knowledge, he says, and even together their collective experience at the beginning of the journey was not much. They found a sweet spot by persistence more than pedigree, and by being obsessive enough to keep learning, keep measuring, keep listening to what the tanks were telling them. They managed to make a product that was decent, then better than decent, and slowly earned trust, glass by glass.

In Singapore, nothing about sake brewing is naturally easy: not the humidity, not the heat, not the lack of purpose-built infrastructure and trained staff you could hire. Yet the sake in our glasses are undeniably high quality. Their uTama Tropic has already clinched a medal at the 2025 Tokyo Sake Challenge. It is real sake, made the hard way, with nothing spared and nothing faked.

Kanpai!

@CharsiuCharlie