We Taste Test Dassai’s Experimental New York-Made Sakes: Dassai Blue Type 23, Dassai Blue Type 35, Dassai Blue Type 50

“As we communicate with New Yorkers, our own senses shift little by little, and my hope is that in five or ten years, or beyond, a sake New Yorkers consider good will emerge out of that.”

– Kazuhiro Sakurai, 4^th generation owner and President of Dassai Inc.

Joël Robuchon took a sip of sake and fell silent.

Among the greatest chefs of his generation, Robuchon was best known for running French fine-dining restaurants with a constellation of Michelin stars spread across Europe and Asia. Dassai had arranged for a sake tasting at Robuchon’s Japanese restaurant at the Hôtel Métropole Monte-Carlo with the hope that Robuchon would like Dassai Sake as an accompaniment for his Japanese dishes. Hiroshi Sakurai was intently watching Robuchon taste his life’s work. What does this legendary chef think of pairing Dassai Sake with his Japanese dishes? The air was thick with apprehension, and Robuchon was strangely laconic. His brows were furrowed, as if deep in thought.

A chance encounter with Michelin-starred French chef Joel Robuchon helped usher Dassai into the fine culinary world of the West. (Image Source: Forbes)

Unbeknownst to the Dassai entourage, the inscrutable Robuchon had come to a startling discovery. The old chef realised that Dassai Sake was even better suited for his French cuisine than at his Japanese restaurant. He immediately thought several of his dishes were perfectly paired with Dassai. Caviar, for instance, would be an excellent match. The fine Junmai Daiginjo could meet the roe on its salty-umami notes, gentle sweetness and creamy texture, while the relatively low acidity kept left the caviar’s delicacy intact. Robuchon also imagined pairing some of his cheeses with the sake: the indulgent Mont d’Or complements Dassai Sake beautifully, with the sake’s inherent umami drawing out the soft cheese’s savoury notes, the slight residual sweetness of the brew rounding out the saltiness.

The Japanese team returned home thinking that Robuchon was not impressed by Dassai Sake. But Robuchon would later reach out to the Sakurais with an even more exciting proposal. Robuchon would like their partnership to open a French restaurant. In 2018, Restaurant Dassaï Joël Robuchon opened in Paris, featuring fine French gastronomy paired extensively with Dassai Sake. There was even a dedicated sake bar on the first floor – allowing European diners to discover sake alongside other cuisines.

The Sakurais have long believed that sake belonged at the dining table even without Japanese cuisine. Sake generally has gentler acidity than wine and also contains amino acids (detected as a ricey umami flavour). This gives a chef myriad possibilities to work with. That fateful meeting with Joël Robuchon resulted in a spectacular validation of their thesis: sake could function at the highest level of European gastronomy.

That helped to spark a grand ambition that would see the company go on to build an US$80 million-dollar Dassai Blue brewery in New York’s Hyde Park. Hiroshi Sakurai’s son and current president, Kazuhiro Sakurai put this dream in context for us: “Dassai is always striving to challenge the idea that sake belongs strictly alongside Japanese food. We aim instead to build a new culture where sake enjoys a broader place at the table with diverse cuisines. Dassai Blue serves as a symbolic expression of this exact philosophy.” (Click here to read our full interview with Dassai President Kazuhiro Sakurai.)

Dassai's new US brewery in Hyde Park, New York, which produces the Dassai Blue Sake (Source: Japan Forward) 

Opened in September 2023, Dassai Blue is a working American sake brewery that produces its own sake using American-grown rice and New York’s water, separate from the Dassai Brewery back home in Yamaguchi. Both breweries concentrate on Junmai Daiginjo – the premium standard for unfortified sake made with rice polished to half its original weight or less, and that same rice polishing ratio is then reflected as the familiar numbers on Dassai’s iconic labels – 23, 39 or 45 – or in Dassai Blue’s case, Type 23, Type 35 or Type 50.

The courage to change how sake is made

When Dassai Blue was first mooted, sake accounted for a meagre 0.2% of total alcoholic beverage consumption in the US. Typical consumers around the world still saw sake mainly as an accompaniment to Japanese food. According to Kazuhiro’s very early experience with American consumers, Dassai Sake was also seen as an expensive and unfamiliar product.

Dassai's current President and 4th generation owner, Kazuhiro Sakurai (Source: Dassai)

So what exactly gave Dassai the confidence to make such a bold bet on the American drinks market? We need a bit of history to understand the existence of the New York brewery.

The elder Sakurai’s confidence in taking Dassai out of Japan grew out of a much less glamorous experience at home. When he first took over the family brewery in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi in 1984, the business was close to collapse. Back then, the brewery focused on producing affordable table sake.

A series of last-minute decisions changed Dassai's fate. (Image Source: Dassai)

Hiroshi put his foot down and made several expensive, courageous, fate-altering decisions. He committed the brewery to only producing premium Junmai Daiginjo under the newly-created Dassai brand. He also looked beyond the local customers and towards the shining Tokyo market.

Brewery operations also changed drastically under Hiroshi. Traditionally, sake production depended on a tōji – a consultant-like master brewer responsible for making the sake and managing the brewing team. Spooked by rumours that the company had gone bankrupt, Dassai’s tōji did not return in 1999. With only three months left before brewing was due to begin, Hiroshi and a small team of four employees – whose jobs had been bottling and delivery – took it upon themselves to brew the sake.

Dassai was emboldened to continue making sake throughout the year with just its employees, who would meticulously record and share production data in a manner that was unprecedented for a tōji at the time. The dynamics within the brewery diverged sharply from the rest of the sake-making industry. Under the old arrangement, a brewery owner was expected to market and the sake and leave its making entirely to the tōji. But as Dassai was brewing with its own company staff, anyone could take part in improving the sake – not just a select elite few within a brewing team. In the decades that followed, the humble brewery steadily grew to become the most celebrated sake brand in the world.

Dassai is a company with plenty of experience with reinvention. It had fundamentally changed how it made sake, and to whom it sold sake. As Dassai continued its search for new customers, that journey took it to places like New York, Paris and Monaco, where the elder Sakurai began to dream of having Dassai served as naturally in French restaurants as grape wine would be served. In Hiroshi’s view, there was no need to completely reinvent the drink to suit Western tastes. It could give diners something different from wine.

The road to Hyde Park ran through a cooking school

In 2015, a delegation from the Culinary Institute of America went on a trip to Japan to study sake and its culinary pairings to prepare its Japanese cuisine curriculum. Pointing out that a Japanese food programme would be incomplete without sake, a member of the delegation floated the idea of Dassai putting a brewery on campus. That way, its students could attend joint curriculum, certification programmes and sake pairing workshops.

Hyde Park in New York State is home to the main campus of The Culinary Institute of America, and a beloved food destination featuring student-staffed world-class restaurants (Source: Hudson Valley Magazine)

This idea surprised Kazuhiro. But he saw more benefits as he gave it more thought. Dassai had previously spent close to a decade looking to crack the American market. He had first-hand experience in New York in 2006 where he spent whole days making calls that sold only a couple of 300ml bottles. Dassai needed local advocates to reach this new audience. In this regard, the CIA’s Hyde Park campus trains chefs, bakers and hospitality professionals who would work far beyond Japanese or American restaurants. This was a great opportunity for Dassai’s team to repeatedly engage with culinary professionals who would decide what to pour beside French, Spanish, Italian or Mexican food and assess how sake would potentially be received in Western dining culture.

In 2016, Dassai formally agreed to begin construction of a brewery at Hyde Park – just across the road from CIA’s campus.

The name “Dassai Blue” comes from an old Asian proverb about the hope for a student to surpass the teacher. As Dassai ventures into the West, the hope is that Dassai Blue could one day make sake as popular as that of the Yamaguchi original.

(Source: Dassai Blue)

New York water meets Arkansas rice

Dassai’s brewery in Japan already had an existing brewing process that operated like clockwork. The brewery sent four experienced brewers from Iwakuni and hired Americans willing to be taught sake-brewing from scratch. However, a system that looked portable on paper could not be directly transplanted to the New York environment. Hiroshi noted with disappointment that the first batches of brews at Dassai Blue were not up to his standard.

The primary challenge was the team’s unfamiliarity with New York’s water – which is appreciably harder than the soft water at Iwakuni. Hard water contains more dissolved minerals. These minerals cause the yeast to work more vigorously, which speeds up fermentation beyond the brewer’s control. Dassai’s team had to respond by filtering the water to ensure that its mineral content allowed for a more manageable fermentation.

(Source: Dassai Blue)

The rice used here behaves differently as well. The majority of the rice bought by Dassai Blue is Arkansas-grown Yamada Nishiki which was first cultivated in the early 2000s. This grain is not interchangeable with rice from Hyogo prefecture. The harder Arkansas-grown rice breaks down more slowly in the mash. Dassai’s team had to respond with stronger koji and a longer steaming period.

As far as possible, the rest of the set-up mirrors the Yamaguchi brewery. Dassai Blue uses the exact same types of yeast strains as the Yamaguchi brewery – a blend of yeast strains #1801 and #1401 in adjusted ratios depending on the rice conditions. Neither does Dassai Blue have a traditional tōji-style role. A team of full-time employees brew throughout the year, document their findings and make adjustments together.

(Source: Dassai Blue)

While the team has the ingredients, system and recipe in place, the company continues to modestly describe Dassai Blue’s sake as a work in progress. Plant manager and Vice President Fumiya Miura has stated that American rice has not yet reached the quality standards of first-class Japanese rice. The team is also sensitive to the Western consumer’s preference for a lower-proof sake – Dassai Blue expressions are bottled at 14% ABV while their Japanese counterparts almost always come in at about 15.5 to 16%.

(Source: Dassai Blue)

When we asked him in an interview how an ideal American sake should taste, Kazuhiro responded with a rather interesting mixture of humility and profoundness. A “good sake” for a New Yorker cannot be simply prescribed by a Japanese brewer after interviews and market research. The process is much more dialectical. According to Kazuhiro, a “good sake” can only arise from a continued dialogue between brewer and drinker: “If we set out to construct a flavour, there is a high chance that we end up with a flavour that New Yorkers do not actually want. What we are doing instead is making, in the environment that is New York, a sake that we ourselves find delicious. And as we communicate with New Yorkers, our own senses shift little by little, and my hope is that in five or ten years, or beyond, a sake New Yorkers consider good will emerge out of that.”

Sake Review: Dassai Blue Type 23

100% Japanese Yamada Nishiki rice polished down to 23%, Junmai Daiginjo, 14% ABV.

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Clear.

Aroma: Very perfumed and forward, chock-full of orchard fruits and creamy rice flour sweetness. It opens with jasmine, honeysuckle and cherry blossoms, seamlessly dipping into an estery lift of sweet just-ripe bananas, juicy Saturn peaches and Asian pear. As it opens, we delve deeper into creamy ricey sweetness, with rice cakes, mochi and rice pudding. A backbone of grainy ricey earthiness along with a delicate spring water mineral quality to it.

Taste: Clean, bright, estery, with a soft mineral thread. Medium bodied and lightly silky in mouthfeel. It opens bright, honeyed and estery, with a somewhat brighter acidity than the Yamaguchi Dassai 23. Ripe pineapples, red apples, lychees and melon – somewhat reminiscent of the most fruity white rum or baijiu styles. As it develops, we get more structure and ricey character coming through, a bright and fine acidity joined by a dry lightly woody cedary edge and a mineral touch of wet rocks. Just as present are some rice porridge sweetness. Growing notes of light vanilla, sandalwood and light cedary bitterness.

Finish: Clean, drying and lightly vanillic. Estery fruits have fully receded, leaving us with a light pithy bitter edge along with creamy lactone and vanillic sweetness, together with a minor dry yoghurt edge. Some coconut cream and rice umami and some chalky mineral noes tapering away.

My Thoughts

This is much more forward than one would have expected from a highly polished Junmai Daiginjo. It is clean but an incredibly estery and generously flavoured Junmai Daiginjo – much more peach and orchard fruits-driven than the comparatively mellower made-in-Yamaguchi Dassai 23. Interestingly, the fruit esters come through in such great intensity that it reminds us of the most estery styles of white rum or Chinese baijiu. Considering that this is a 100% Japanese rice sake, I have a hypothesis that the estery notes are due to a more active fermentation caused by the use of harder New York water.

Fruit intensity aside, the palate exhibits a classically clean, precise and well-balanced Junmai Daiginjo profile built around a core of melon and yoghurt sweetness, along with subtler notes of earthiness and umami from the rice.

Sake Review: Dassai Blue Type 35

80% Arkansas Yamada Nishiki rice, 20% Japanese Yamada Nishiki rice, polished down to 35%, Junmai Daiginjo, 14% ABV.

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Clear.

Aroma: Fragrant, fruity with a bit more greenness and rustic rice-led earthiness showing through. Opens with indistinct florals, sweet peaches and honeydew, leading into light green apples and pear. There’s a gentle steamed rice sweetness along with light Greek yogurt. And then the distinctive grain husk earthiness. A touch of wet stone minerality. Compared to the earlier expression, this feels a bit more balanced between fruits and rusticity than being purely fruit-driven.

Taste: Fruit forward, yet distinctively saline and more grounded. Medium bodied, with a gentler and rounder acidity. I have pineapples, white peaches, green melon and apples. There is clear sweetness here, though a little more restrained and less honeyed. Smooth rice umami joined by a backbone of rustic grain husk. Quickly, it leads us into a long, saline savouriness and minerality, joined by a growing dry, lightly spiced and resinous edge.

Finish: Clean, brisk and drying. Soft delicate rice sweetness with fading cassia bark and light savouriness of Jasmine rice. A resinous dryness leaves the tongue feeling slightly tingly with a touch of cedar and ginger.

My Thoughts

This is the huskiest, earthiest and most savoury of the lineup. The structure is quite similar to that of the 23, but it is much less flamboyant, with a more grounded fruitiness paired with an equally prominent clean, crisp earthiness of Arkansas rice. Based on our research, this expression has the greatest proportion of Arkansas-grown rice – so it is hard not to infer that this would be the source of that prominent earthy grip and savouriness.

This fresh bold expression makes for a very gourmet sake – one that will pair excellently with savoury meats or salty seafoods.

Sake Review: Dassai Blue Type 50

100% Japanese Yamada Nishiki rice, polished down to 50%, Junmai Daiginjo, 14% ABV.

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Clear.

Aroma: Broad and umami led, it opens with savoury dashi broth and fragrant steamed Jasmine rice. Some soft fruits sitting behind – light peaches, fresh apricot and a touch of melons. It has a rounded, slightly lactic-driven creaminess, reminiscent of yoghurt, overlaid upon a base of minerality and salinity.

Taste: Substantial, silky, rounded and with a prominent structure. Medium bodied, with a broad, velvety texture, and balanced acidity. It opens on juicy peaches, green plums, melons and pineapples, supported by a gentle honeyed rice sweetness. But unlike the Type 23, this has a very prominent core of umami – chicken broth with a touch of soy sauce, and a clear structure of heavy slate-like minerality. There’s a touch of mint and a pinch of dry lemon zest along with a very faint carbonated effervescent lift.

Finish: Long, clean and drying. Lemon zest dryness and a touch of pith bitterness. A drawn-out ricey savouriness with trailing chalky minerality and salinity.

My Thoughts

This is a highly expressive, layered and satisfying sake. While the Type 23 appears to have a more ethereal profile, the Type 50 brings more breadth, density and big flavours across the dimensions of texture, fruit, umami and minerality. On the nose it is immediately ripe and fruity, with bright notes of peaches and melons. The palate is soft but highly textured and weighty, with judicious acidity preserving freshness, and obvious notes of the same fruits with gentler honeyed sweetness along with the most robust earthiness and minerality across the range.

A highly accessible, flavourful and easy-to-appreciate sake with a decent amount of umami that also makes it a versatile for food pairings across a range of dishes.

@CharsiuCharlie