In a city built on reinvention, there’s pleasure in discovering a new thing behind a door that looks like it belongs to something else. Not a velvet-rope entrance, not a back-alley whisper, not the hushed “ring the bell” theatre that tends to attach itself to so-called exclusive drinking places in New York City.

Brooklyn Kura’s first trick, before a New Yorker gets to the liquid, is architectural: one finds themselves in a redeveloped warehouse complex, and the vibe reads airy and bright, closer to an upscale natural wine bar than a sake den. Sake comes in white wine glasses. A draught tower pulls it the way you’d pull lager. You can see the steel tanks behind glass. The aesthetic leans playful, even a little Bauhaus-bright rather than leaning into the expected neo-Kyoto cues.

(Source: Molly Tavoletti)

The second trick is olfactory. When the sake is ready, opening one of the tanks would release a burst of tropical fruits. On brew days on the other hand, the room can carry a faintly eggy sulphur tone that rises when proteins start breaking down during rice steaming. Suddenly this isn’t just “Asian rice wine”, guests can see food science happening in real time. The operation felt highly technical from the start, partly because Brooklyn Kura’s head brewer talks like a lab person who happened to fall for fermentation’s romance: steaming gelatinises starch, mould does the conversion work, and then yeast turns that sugar into alcohol while flavour spins out of the margins.

This presentation is a direct rebuttal to how a lot of Americans first meet sake: warmed, or in vodka shot glasses, glued to sushi-night, or worse, treated as a novelty payload for beer bombs. Brooklyn Kura built an atmosphere that nudges its guests toward a different posture, a slower one: smell this, taste this, talk about it the way you would talk about wine or craft beer. Even in Japanese-language reportage, the recurring detail is the same: groups in conversation, sake in wine glasses, light pouring in, tanks in view.

A collision of spreadsheets and spores

Sometime in 2013, two like-minded Americans met at a wedding in Japan. They found a shared interest in Japanese sake and decided to travel together, drink unusually good sake for the first time, and the joke of starting a sake brewery in New York slowly became a reality.

The founders, Brian Polen and Brandon Doughan (Source: Umami Mart)

As the brewery became real, a natural division of labour came about. Brandon Doughan is the man behind the science – he had worked as a biochemist or research scientist, working on heart disease and cancer drug development, and was long comfortable with home fermentation as a hobby and the essential mould-driven starch conversion process. Brian Polen on the other hand, was of the corporate finance world with experiences at American Express – he is the one with the operational logic required to make this kind of project exist in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Sake brewing is capital-intensive in a way that might surprise many a beer brewer. You need space, refrigeration, temperature control, specialised equipment, and a cleanliness regime that punishes improvisation. In one interview, Brian was explicit about the challenge: a business case for Brooklyn Kura didn’t make sense unless they built enough capacity to justify the investment, which is a very un-sexy thing to say and a very adult thing to build around.

Brian and Brandon would not leave their jobs until late 2016, before they secured a small development space at an “old Pfizer facility” in Bushwick, where they focused on scaling recipes and figuring out regulatory and supply chain realities while construction of their actual brewery took place in a redeveloped warehouse complex in Brooklyn. In early 2018, they began selling their first bottles and also opened a taproom (with its iconic blue doors that became both a literal entrance and a shorthand for the project’s identity) – wherein guests could see, hear and smell the brewing process.

But to understand the scale of the ambition to run New York’s first sake brewery, you’d have to consider the practical realities that come with the capital intensiveness of sake brewing. In one interview, Brandon points out the obvious-but-not-so-obvious problem: there wasn’t a local ecosystem of sake equipment and inherited practice. The team had to start from zero, drawing up plans for machines and tools.

Another key “ingredient” that the team had to build from scratch is microbial. In parts of Japan where sake has been brewed for hundreds of years, the buildings themselves carry a kind of microbial history. Over generations, Japanese breweries develop a shared seasonal intuition about the invisible life in their breweries – they know when certain wild yeasts might appear, or how to deal with a particular unwanted bacteria.

A new sake brewery in New York City does not have that. There is no legacy ecosystem of sake production. Instead, there is whatever unknown microbes happen to live in an old warehouse in Brooklyn. Brandon and his team has to engineer a controlled environment from scratch to deal with microbes that can ruin a highly vulnerable batch of sake very quickly (unlike beer which is boiled and hopped, sake mash has very little anti-microbial protection early in the process).

For these reasons, Brooklyn Kura’s koji room is lined with washable, food-safe polycloth rather than cedar or stainless steel; a sanitation-forward design choice. It also has a cleanliness regime that punishes improvisation. This reveals the logic of a New York City urban sakagura: you optimise for cleanability and repeatability, while slowly learning year over year how to improve quality within these parameters.

Sparking New York’s fledgling sake movement

Brooklyn Kura arrived into a city that already drank a lot of sake but didn’t necessarily think about it. In sweeping cultural terms, New York had long been a place where Japanese restaurants and serious import lists existed, but the average “sake experience” was still trapped in a narrow corridor: sushi, karaoke, maybe a dim bar, and not much education.

The brewery’s earliest cultural decision was to re-stage sake in a language New Yorkers already knew: beer-bar casualness and wine-glass aromatics. The brewery serves sake on draught, uses wine glasses, and leans into a rotating set of offerings in the taproom. It is a way to meet American consumers where they already are, while still vying for respect from the Japanese sake-drinking community through proper sake brewing techniques.

Brandon had pointed out in one interview that Brooklyn Kura will adapt sake to local tastes, ingredients and culture. American craft brewers took traditional European beer styles and boldly experimented with them to create things like the American IPA, Brooklyn Kura is attempting to translate sake into a vernacular that makes sense for New Yorkers. And while he isn’t literally trying to "IPA-ify" sake, the brewery does embrace the messy, experimental spirit of American craft brewing.

Brooklyn Kura’s Occidental Dry-Hopped Junmai, for instance, is a dry-hopped sake that includes red grape concentrate, giving it a rosy colour and citrusy aroma. It legally qualifies as a liqueur rather than traditional seishu, but Brooklyn Kura uses it as a transparent argument that experimentation can be transparent rather than gimmicky: if it’s hopped, say it’s hopped, and let people decide. The Grand Prairie Junmai Ginjo, on the other hand, is a direct homage to the evolving American sake rice supply chain, made exclusively with Japan’s iconic Yamada Nishiki rice and named after the first place where Yamada Nishiki was first grown in Arkansas.

Remarkably, a crucial part of this translation thoughtful deciding what not to copy. The founders decided not to install traditional Japanese symbolic objects like shrines or sugidama because they profess not to fully understand the cultural weight behind them. It was better to be honest about what you are than to bolt on symbols you cannot carry responsibly.

Since starting New York’s first sake brewery, Brooklyn Kura has become a reference point for the city and state’s sake moment, especially as other producers began opening nearby. Today, Brooklyn Kura is no longer the only brewery in the area – Kato Sake Works opened in 2020 by Japan-born Shinobu Kato, became part of the mini-trend. Dassai Blue Sake Brewery (in New York, but outside the city) followed in 2023, yet another vote of confidence in “outside Japan” sake from a major Japanese producer with pedigree. A casual visit to Brooklyn Kura’s facility today would find us a casual list of what New York now offers: Brooklyn Kura, Kato Sake Works, and Dassai Blue, as if that triad is quickly becoming normal.

Founder of Brooklyn-based Kato Sake Works, Shinobu Kato (Source: Molly Woodward)

Within a few short years, Brooklyn Kura helped turn sake in New York from an imported object into a locally legible category. A more interesting question, though, is how sake is brewed at the kura.

Brewing sake at Brooklyn Kura

Brooklyn Kura’s philosophy is easiest to understand through what it refuses to do. It is strongly associated with junmai-style sake (no added distilled alcohol), and focuses heavily on nama, unpasteurised sake, which is logistically painful because it’s fragile and cold-chain-dependent.

This focus on unpasteurised nama is relatively rare even in Japan. But it makes good sense in a cosmopolitan city which has access to every great imported nihonshu. Brooklyn Kura could offer New Yorkers immediate freshness when others cannot: drink it soon, drink it cold, treat it like something alive.

The brewery taps into New York City’s water supply which – surprisingly – the founders found was softer and cleaner than the founders expected from a huge city. In fact, this water primarily comes from mountainous, largely forest-protected areas upstate where the land around reservoirs is tightly regulated and sparsely developed. This meant that the water is already clean and microbiologically stable, and could be minimally treated before brewing clean-tasting sake.

Many of the brewery’s regular sake bottlings use blends of domestic American-grown rice. This includes Californian Calrose and Yamada Nishiki.

And while Brooklyn Kura is respectful of Japanese method, it does not tie its hands at every step. For instance, it has made an adaptation to its yeast starter method, the shubō or moto, which is the microbial engine that seeds the main fermentation. Traditional sake brewing tends to use a “traditional” two-week rapid starter approach (sokujō). Brooklyn Kura instead uses a high temperature saccharification method (kō on tōka) that can be completed in about six days by heating koji, rice, and water to very high temperature for hours, then cooling before adding lactic acid and yeast.

The motivation is both pragmatic and sensorial.

This process accelerates the enzymatic breakdown of starch into sugar and ensures fermentation begins in a controlled, sugar-rich and comparatively clean environment. The starter builds alcohol strength quickly and it shortens the vulnerable early phase in which stray microbes might be introduced.

In flavour terms, their process favours clarity over rusticity. The traditional two-week sokujō build allows for a slower layering of microbial activity and metabolic by-products. Brooklyn Kura’s high temperature saccharification compresses, and the resulting fermentations are described as clean, direct and fruit-driven rather than earthy or deeply savoury. The palate tends towards crisp definition rather than dense umami weight.

This aligns with the brewery’s commitment to nama. Unpasteurised sake already emphasises freshness, volatility and immediacy. A tightly controlled starter that produces bright, well-defined fermentations supports that goal.

Seen together, the water, the American-grown rice, the emphasis on nama and the modified starter form a coherent picture. The brewery is not attempting to replicate a single Japanese regional archetype. Instead, it applies Japanese technical principles with deliberate adjustments, producing sake that is structurally clean, aromatically bright and designed to be consumed fresh in the city where it is made.

Partnerships, expansion and a Brooklyn terroir?

In 2021, Brooklyn Kura formalised a collaboration with Niigata’s Hakkaisan Brewery, one of Japan’s most established and technically respected sake producers. The move did not replace the Brooklyn team’s brewing philosophy, but it changed the scale on which they could pursue it.

Hakkaisan took an equity stake and committed to sharing technical knowledge, production insight and long-term strategic support in a shared goal of making sake global. If sake was going to become globally ubiquitous in the way wine and beer are, it cannot remain purely Japanese-made and Japanese-consumed. Hakkaisan had once considered establishing its own brewery in America directly, but realised that it would prefer to support a local producer because that’s what creates a real market.

This endorsement transformed Brooklyn Kura from a New York novelty into a test case: can American rice and New York water produce something that can coexist with Japanese benchmarks without pretending to be Japanese?

The most visible result of the partnership was physical expansion. Brooklyn Kura moved from its smaller early footprint into a dramatically larger space 3,000 to 20,000 square feet, spread over two stories. The tanks grew in number and size. Production capacity increased multiple-fold, moving from a small craft output into volumes that could support broader distribution.

Hakkaisan in turn began importing and selling Brooklyn Kura’s sakes in Japan.

The partnership strengthened Brooklyn Kura’s legitimacy in two directions at once. In the United States, it signalled that a serious Japanese brewery was willing to align itself with this New York experiment. In Japan, it suggested that Brooklyn Kura was not a novelty act but a technically credible operation.

What is striking is how quickly the expansion becomes a flavour argument, not just a business one. Small doesn't always mean better in sake brewing! In an insightful interview with Nancy Matsumoto, it was elaborated that the larger batches give the mash greater thermal mass, and that this affords more temperature control, allowing the brewers to ultimately produce a more rounded flavour in the finished sake. With a proper lab and technical input from Hakkaisan’s kurabito (brewery staff), Brandon can even measure koji enzyme activity rather than relying purely on feel.

This is where Brooklyn Kura’s idea of terroir becomes oddly persuasive. For conventional sake brewers, a sake’s terroir or “sense of place” has a certain kind of rustic romance that sits closer to the natural environment –the water source, where the rice is grown or agricultural decisions.

Brandon however sees his “terroir” as an engineered, urban form of locality, and as how his brewery’s identity is inseparable from the tools it chooses and the unique decisions they enable. As their instrumentation become more sophisticated that evolving capability, rather than rustic romance, is what “a sense of place” looks like in an American urban sakagura.

Why Brooklyn Kura really matters

If you strip away the “first in New York” headline, Brooklyn Kura’s deeper significance sits in how it rewrites the social contract of sake in America.

It’s the argument that sake should not require you to perform Japaneseness to earn pleasure. That shows up in the obvious things: the wine glasses, the open room, the natural wine-bar vibe, the draft system. But it also shows up in the ethics of authenticity: refusing to install symbolic objects like shrines or sugidama without the cultural understanding to carry them, and instead focusing on honesty and directness as the ritual. It’s a thoughtful rejection of the kitsch pathway that a lot of imported cultural products get pushed into.

Brooklyn Kura also matters because its partnership with Hakkaisan is one of the few examples in the sake world where a prominent Japanese brewery entered a long-term relationship with a non-Japanese producer.

Then there’s the education piece, which is pretty radical in the context of American sake. Many American drink categories grow through marketing or lifestyle association, but sake’s bottleneck in America has long been knowledge and confidence: consumers don’t know how to choose, and professionals often don’t know how to sell. Brooklyn Kura’s response is to build education directly into the physical brewery, framing it as an “in-house” Studies Center meant to train both drinkers and hospitality staff who may take sake knowledge back to restaurants all over the world. This is where Brooklyn Kura looks less like a brewery and more like an institution looking to seed a future labour force that is sorely needed for sakes in its part of the world.

(Source: Phylisa Wisdom)

Brooklyn Kura will probably not be the thing that “saves sake.” That would be an absurd burden to place on a young American brewery. But it is perhaps the clearest case study in what it looks like when sake stops being a Japanese export product and starts being a true global method: rice, water, yeast, koji, and a set of decisions that reveal who you are and all that you’re willing to learn.

Sake Review: Brooklyn Kura Tidal Junmai Sake

Made with 100% Californian Calrose rice, 50% rice polishing ratio

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Almost colourless with a slight yellow cast.

Aroma: Distinctively ricey but relatively restrained. Led by a clear rice aroma with very soft florals and fruit. Mellow banana and plantain-like fruit, with gentle honedew melons and soft white florals.

Taste: Definitively rice-forward on the palate. It opens with a delicate rice sweetness, lightly fruity, with medium-plus body and a balanced, composed texture giving honeydew and white nectarine. I get a cool herbal mint lift alongside some pine as the mid-palate gets more savoury and structured without taking away from the fruit.

Finish: Very controlled and restrained. Tightens up nicely and turns dry with a crisp mineral character. Some fading rice umami, though not so much that it becomes rustic.

My Thoughts

This is relatively restrained but in a great way: clean, composed, and very food-friendly. It gives some melon and stone fruits, but remains firmly grounded in rice-forward aromas.

The use of Calrose rice seems most evident in that the sweetness is driven more by rice than overt fruit or floral tones, and there’s also a sense of density and confident weight that gives breadth and roundenes without pushing into excess. It’s precise and composed with a texture that makes it especially satisfying at the dining table.

@CharsiuCharlie