We Taste Test LINNÉ Kyoto's Sakes Made From Barley, Kyoto Chestnut & Japanese Soba From A Sake Brewer Who Ventures Beyond Rice: LINNÉ 800 Buckwheat (800 蕎麦), 800 Barley Tenpai (800 大麦天盃), 800 Chestnut (800 栗)
The Japanese have always been admired for their ability to marry continuity with invention: mastering an established craft, then developing it into a distinctively new form while the origin always remains recognisable. Of course, every great movement still requires someone who would take the first step to do things differently.
Yet how far can a tradition change and still be recognisably itself? Would sake still be sake if we subtract rice from its ingredients list?
For Shoya Imai, those questions came after a decade of working in sake before an unexpected answer began to take shape among a collection of ancient carpenters’ tools.
Temple carpenters tools on display at the Maison de la culture du Japon a Paris (Source: Shoya Imai)
After spending five years founding and working in one of France’s first sake breweries, in December 2023, Shoya visited an exhibition on ancient Japanese temple builders at the Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris. The exhibition explored how craftspeople made specialised tools for particular jobs. Apparently, back in the 1940s, these builders used up to 179 tools. By 1985, only about 20 tools remained in common use.
This thought led Shoya to consider his own tools of the trade. Koji – a fuzzy mould-inoculated rice that turns starch into sugar – is a foundational tool celebrated in sake making. But we take for granted that this simple ingredient actually comes from a much broader family of fungi with numerous different sub-strains that produce hundreds of different enzymes that react with starches and amino acids. Each sub-species of koji might produce slightly different flavours and textures in a brew, ranging from savoury to sweet. Shoya looked at these ancient temple builders and thought, what if he could go beyond rice-based koji, grow the mould on plants with different qualities and learn what each could do?
Buckwheat koji from Ichikara Batake buckwheat (Source: LINNE)
This was the basis of the new company he would go on to found in Kyoto in 2024 – LINNÉ. We might think of LINNÉ as a sake brewery, but the more accurate term would be a “fermentation collective” as it describes itself, as its work takes koji through barley, sweet potato, chestnut, millet and buckwheat – its flagship.
In this feature, we’ll dive into why this sake brewer believes that the next big frontier in brewing culture is koji.
Growing up in a 19th-century brewery
Shoya grew up in an eight-generation sake brewing family. But his passion for sake brewing really began when he was confronted with the possibility of losing the brewery in which he had grown up.
His family ran Hijiri Shuzo, a brewery founded in 1841 in Shibukawa, Gunma Prefecture, lying northwest of Tokyo.
The eight-generation Hijiri Shuzo brewery in Shibukawa, Gunma Prefecture (Source: Gunma Prefecture)
The entire household organised itself around brewing sake. His father was the seventh-generation owner and brewer, while his mother too came from another sake brewing family. Winter mornings began with vast quantities of rice being steamed, and breakfast with contracted brewing workers who would lodge at the family home.
As the third son, Shoya had more room to consider how he might take part in that world. The eldest brother would take on the mantle of becoming the next owner of the family brewery. Meanwhile, Shoya, who studied at the prestigious University of Tokyo, had some freedom to pursue a range of different work in F&B e-commerce, retail and store management.
Shoya's eldest brother, Takeo Imai, eighth-generation head of Hijiri Shuzo (Source: Gunma Prefecture)
Shoya nevertheless developed a desire to become a producer himself – a desire that strengthened when the sake industry suffered in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and his family brewery confronted the possibility of insolvency. While Hijiri Shuzo eventually recovered, Shoya discovered that he would like a career where he took responsibility for sake making itself.
Founding WAKAZE
Shoya Imai in Kyoto (Source: Kotosara Publishing)
Shoya’s initial fear of losing his family brewery developed into a concern for the Japanese sake industry at large. He attributed the sake industry’s decline to the fact that Japanese producers struggle to communicate the value of their product.
Around this time, Shoya got to know a sake enthusiast by the name of Takuma Inagawa, a bright young BCG management consultant who spoke three languages and had studied in Paris. Takuma’s family runs a business of manufacturing camera lenses, and like Shoya, Takuma identified with the struggle that many great Japanese companies faced in finding product-market fit.
Takuma Inagawa, WAKAZE's founder and CEO (Source: WAKAZE)
Takuma pitched an idea to a group of friends who would become the early WAKAZE team. The team resonated with the shared ambition to “make nihonshu a world drink”. For sake to become a truly international drink, Shoya argued, sake had to demonstrate that it could be made outside of Japan, and be loved by an international audience.
Drawn to its culture of pairing food and wine, the early WAKAZE team set their sights on the French market, and on eventually establishing a brewery in France. If they could make it in Paris, they could make it anywhere.
Shoya thus began his training as a sake brewer around 2015, with two years at Aramasa in Akita, followed by a year across Masuda Shuzoten, Abe Shuzo, and his family’s Hijiri Shuzo, with a stint at Kumazawa Shuzo.
How the seishu licensing paradox gave birth to Japan’s craft sake movement
The famous Theodor “Dr” Seuss was challenged by his editor to write a children’s book while following a challenging restriction: he could use only 50 different words. This led him to come up with the whimsical, highly memorable Green Eggs and Ham.
One could compellingly argue that similarly, the emergence of Japan’s modern craft sake movement might have been triggered by Japan’s highly restrictive seishu licensing system, which led newcomers such as WAKAZE, haccoba and LIBROM to find highly creative solutions to this regulatory roadblock.
WAKAZE's Tokyo brewery was established to focus on craft sake (Source: Shoya Imai)
Under Japan’s alcohol production laws, seishu (清酒) is the legal category for conventional strained sake made with rice, rice koji and water within prescribed rules. The Japanese government has historically applied supply-and-demand considerations when granting sake manufacturing licences, in part to maintain market stability and prevent a boom-bust cycle. In practice, seishu licences are not available, and new entrants who wish to produce seishu would ordinarily have to acquire or succeed an existing licensed brewery.
Paradoxically, new entrants like WAKAZE quickly realised that there was a separate type of sake brewery licence that was widely available and easily granted for “other brewed alcohol” (その他). This created a counterintuitive result: the team simply had to add yuzu, herbs, flowers or any other botanicals to their sake recipe to move their product outside of the legal definition of seishu, and have it validly licensed under Japanese law.
With funding secured by Takuma, WAKAZE established its Tokyo brewery in 2018 and officially began operating under the “other brewed alcohol” licence. Here, Shoya’s conventional brewing expertise was injected with a colourful palette of tea, herbs and fruit. Among other things, he developed a flower-based fermentation starter inspired by an old brewing text and another starter soured with Chinese dark tea.
Shoya Imai brewing at the Paris brewery (Source: Shoya Imai)
Then in 2019, Shoya moved to France to establish WAKAZE’s Paris brewery – the Kura Grand Paris. Here, the WAKAZE team first focused on conventional sake brewing. Shoya worked with very hard water, lightly polished table rice and a wine yeast from a local white-grape vineyard, with an additive-free brewing system.
As WAKAZE expanded, Shoya’s responsibilities moved beyond France. In 2023, WAKAZE entered into a joint venture with Takara Shuzo – a prominent shochu and sake producer – to develop products for both Japan and the US. This resulted in SummerFall “Classic Bubbles”, a canned sparkling sake made with Californian Calrose rice, among other new products.
The SummerFall Classic Bubbles canned sake (Source: Palate Project)
For Shoya, developing this drink meant working across Kyoto and California while still being responsible for brewing in France. He spent more than a third of the year travelling to Japan and the United States, and the time differences made it feel as though he was brewing “somewhere, 24 hours a day”.
Shoya thought hard about his priorities. After seeing SummerFall through to completion and handing his WAKAZE production to his colleagues, Shoya stepped away from the company.
(Source: Shoya Imai)
In a published homecoming essay, he described spending his final months in France thinking hard about work he had left unfinished, and possibilities he could pursue back home in Japan. After that fateful exhibition on temple builders, Shoya thought about investigating the tools that a brewer typically has at his disposal. His interest settled on koji.
Establishing LINNÉ
Shoya stated that he wanted to work on a goal that others could continue beyond his own lifetime, again citing his inspiration from the generations of craftspeople involved in maintaining shrines and temples. The immediate task he set for himself was to learn how koji grows on various crops, then discover how different koji behaves when brewed.
His work at WAKAZE had already seen him dabble with adding another herb or fruit to an otherwise conventional sake recipe. But as craft sake breweries that incorporate herbs or fruit multiplied across Japan, Shoya felt little originality in following the same playbook that would result in “similar expressions overlap”. No brewer in Japan had yet attempted to switch up the koji.
First water-koji starter at Kura Grand Paris (Source: Shoya Imai)
For the uninitiated, in conventional sake-making, a portion of steamed rice is first inoculated with koji mould and cultivated before it is added to a mash. Koji is necessary because yeast cannot ferment rice starch directly – the starch has to first be converted into simpler sugars. The enzymes provided by koji break down the starches into sugars, as well as turning proteins into amino acids and other flavour compounds. As sugar becomes available to the yeast, the main sake mash begins to ferment.
Conventional sake-making virtually only uses yellow koji on rice as a saccharification agent, although in theory it is possible for a sake maker to experiment with different combinations of koji moulds and the substrate, whether yellow koji on buckwheat, white koji on barley, or black koji on rice. The possibilities are seemingly endless.
Shoya Imai with traditional carpentry tools at Shokodo (Source: LINNE via JBpress)
Shoya compared koji to a chef’s knife – the essential tool a brewer uses in his work. He argued that specialised koji, like the specialised tools once used by ancient temple builders, had lost functions as practice narrowed. He wanted to learn what additional kinds could make possible.
After returning to Japan, Shoya studied shochu distillers, who have already demonstrated the possibilities of making alcohol from different koji moulds and non-rice crops, such as barley, buckwheat or sweet potato.
Carl von Linné's foundational Systema Naturae divided the natural world into the Animal Kingdom (Animalia) and Plant Kingdom (Plantae), and introduced a system of genus and species-naming for living organisms still used today.
In April 2024, he founded LINNÉ in Kyoto as a “phantom brewery”, crediting his friend, Hiraku Ogura, for naming his new venture after the influential Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, the Father of Modern Taxonomy who scientifically named over 12,000 species of plants and animals.
As a phantom brewery, LINNÉ does not have brewing facilities of its own, but borrows spaces from existing breweries to produce alcohol under its own brand. Koji making and fermentation often did not happen at the same premises, or involve the same people. For instance, Shoya might source koji spores from Kojiya Sanzaemon and inoculate the grains himself. Sweet potato koji was also sourced from two separate koji makers in Hyogo, and sent to a host brewery in Fukuoka for fermentation.
Shoya hand-working buckwheat koji (Source: LINNE)
Operating as a phantom brewery brought to LINNÉ an unexpected benefit: it had the flexibility of finding the most appropriate facilities and specialists to work with each ingredient. The arrangement also became a form of shared research coordinated by LINNÉ, bringing together knowledge that no single host supplies on its own.
The first trials took place in 2024 at haccoba’s Namie brewery in Fukushima, with barley koji sake (sake brewed from rice and barley koji). Shoya also developed buckwheat koji at haccoba before summer work at Abe Shuzo produced a buckwheat koji sake and rice koji sake. In autumn, he travelled to LIBROM in Fukuoka to produce his sweet potato koji sake. These sakes were all made with rice in the main mash, but with different types of koji.
The haccoba team at its brewery (Source: haccoba)
These early brews became the 800 range, pronounced “yao”, a reference to yaoyorozu no kami, the “eight million gods” of Shinto belief. Shoya describes this as representing “the Japanese spirit of finding gods in everything, the stance of making sake from everything”. It gave him a reason to consider each plant on its own terms. Barley, buckwheat and sweet potato could each offer something worth brewing with.
Over the following years, that enquiry produced a considerable variety of drinks. Barley-koji sakes were blended and aged in barrels from Japanese beer brewer FAR YEAST BREWING. Sweet potato was inoculated with white koji or yellow koji that were used in a lightly sparkling collaboration brew with LIBROM.
(Source: LIBROM)
Even a rice field offered more than one possible brewing ingredient. Working with the rice-growing project Shinpaku in Hyogo, Shoya became interested in barnyard millet, ordinarily treated as a weed in the rice paddies. He harvested the millet, washed it and heated it in a tea kettle, finding a character reminiscent of tea and herbs. This inspired millet koji, which was used in another LINNÉ brew.
Brewing with Buckwheat
Buckwheat is most commonly encountered in the familiar Japanese soba noodles. After a meal of soba one evening, Shoya decided that he’d like to explore brewing with buckwheat koji.
He first visited a shochu distiller: Unkai Shuzo’s Gokase distillery in Miyazaki, a pioneer of buckwheat koji-making. Shoya’s task was to find out how he could work with it as a sake brewer.
For his first buckwheat koji brew, Shoya worked with the buckwheat farming and soba-making company Ichikara Batake in Ojiya, Niigata. Shoya obtained the Toyomusume buckwheat variety which was inoculated with yellow koji spores at haccoba’s Namie brewery before travelling to Abe for fermentation. It uses Niigata rice for its main mash (before switching to Omachi from Okayama in future batches). Shoya also brought in an older sake-making practice called hashira-shochu, which replaces part of the brewing water with kasutori shochu, a spirit distilled from sake lees. This addition helps to give the sake a kire: a clean finish after the flavour has developed.
Drafts of the 800 symbol drawn by temple carpenter Soichiro Yokokawa (Source: LINNE)
The result was the 800 Buckwheat (800 蕎麦, “800 Soba”) – LINNÉ’s flagship product. The milky-white sake comes with a viscous texture and a slightly sweet rice aroma reminiscent of shiratama, the flour used for rice dumplings. Serving at higher temperatures brings out a subtle earthy taste with a distinctly nutty aroma that evokes soba-yu – the hot, starchy water left over from boiling soba noodles that people often drink as a warming post-meal “soup”.
Brewing with Barley
While the 800 Buckwheat allowed Shoya to explore brewing with buckwheat koji and rice, with rice as the main brewing ingredient, a collaboration with Tenpai Shuzo, a fourth-generation barley shochu distiller, led to a recipe that dispensed with rice altogether.
Barley is yet another crop that requires specialised processing. For this brew, Shoya relied on Tenpai’s mill to polish Haruka Nijo barley from the Chikushi plain in western Japan. White barley koji was prepared at both Tenpai and Choryo Shuzo’s Yao brewery in Osaka, before the mash of barley was fermented at Yao.
But how does a sake-trained brewer adapt to brewing with barley? For 800 Barley 〈Tenpai〉 (800 大麦〈天盃〉), Shoya stated that he applied ginjo brewing methods to this all-barley formulation. In conventional sake, ginjo brewing usually means a combination of well-polished rice with slow fermentation at low temperatures to develop clean and fruity aromas. The use of white koji (instead of conventional yellow koji) also develops more citric acid in the brew.
This yields an all-barley “sake” that comes with aromas of violet and raspberry, with a clean citrusy acidity and a savoury barley finish.
Barley field in Haruka Nijo (Source: LINNE)
Brewing with Kyoto Chestnuts
Peeled Kyotamba chestnuts (Source: LINNÉ)
During a visit to the nearby town of Kyotamba in Kyoto, Shoya met with the town’s deputy mayor, who suggested that it would be fitting for a Kyoto brewer like LINNÉ to consider working with chestnuts. Chestnuts are a particularly culturally iconic autumn delicacy in the region, and the Tamba chestnut (Tanbaguri) grown in central Kyoto Prefecture is nationally famous.
Shoya connected with Kyoto’s historic chestnut companies such as Kyotamba Kuri Kobo, which specialises in roasted chestnuts, and Tamba Noen, which runs a premium chestnut farm that produces massive, high-moisture chestnuts that can weigh as much as 70 grams per single nut.
While chestnuts are not technically a cereal grain (like barley, buckwheat, or rice), they are unusual in the nut world for being made of complex carbohydrates and starch, with a lower fat content. This makes chestnut flesh a workable substrate for koji mould to thrive.
However, chestnuts remain a very expensive material for Shoya to work with. His first attempt to inoculate koji on chestnuts failed. Unwanted microbes multiplied uncontrollably and an entire batch was “wiped out”. He then walked ten minutes to Onokoro Island Shrine, where he found a shrine to the eight million gods and wept.
Chestnut mash in a jar (Source: LINNE)
His subsequent batches fared better.
Brewing took place in Kentaro Chokeiji’s Sake Underground on Awaji Island, Hyogo. Rice was steamed over firewood and brushwood, with the same fire warming the koji room, and fermentation took place within large jars set into the ground. While chestnut flesh was turned into yellow chestnut koji, the woody and bitter chestnut skins were saved and added to the mash. The mash was then fermented using a kimoto starter, which develops the starter’s acidity through lactic-acid bacteria.
This was named the 800 Chestnut Underground (800 栗 Underground, “800 Kuri Underground”). The first release was made as a cream-coloured doburoku, which retains the rice solids instead of filtering or pressing them away. Subsequent releases were pressed and filtered like conventional sake to yield a glossy amber liquid, while the main mash is made with glutinous rice from Kyoto. LINNÉ describes the chestnut koji sake as having a ripe-apple sweet-sourness, fine concentrated astringency and a roasted-chestnut finish.
Fermentation jars at Sake Underground, Awaji Island (Source: Sake Underground)
While the sake is absolutely drinkable now, LINNÉ entertains koshu ambitions for this particular expression. As mentioned, chestnut skin was added to the main mash. Shoya expects that, if this is allowed to bottle-age, the tannic compounds derived from the bitter skins might develop over several years and bring greater complexity and depth to the profile.
The evolution of sake culture before our eyes
Shoya’s range now has five established product lines: barley, buckwheat, rice, sweet potato and chestnut – buckwheat being its flagship, while chestnut gave it a particular connection to Kyoto. Having found that sake could be brewed from koji made with all these different plants, Shoya repeatedly refined each recipe batch after batch.
LINNÉ phase matrix for redefining sake (Source: LINNÉ)
LINNÉ built its credibility within a short amount of time thanks to Shoya’s connection to traditional sake brewing (as a son of the historic Hijiri Shuzo) and as a modern pioneer in Japan’s craft sake movement at both WAKAZE and LINNÉ. The work draws on all of that experience: the practical discipline of conventional sake production, and years spent finding out which parts of a traditional recipe could be updated.
After years of operating as a phantom brewery, making LINNÉ’s first sakes in borrowed facilities, Shoya is now preparing to open a brewery of his very own in Kyoto. He has chosen Gojozaka, in the city’s Kiyomizu area, where a surviving pottery kiln stands on a new site being redeveloped to accommodate brewing, dining and pottery workshops. The new brewery is scheduled to open in February 2027, followed by the restaurant in mid-April.
Shoya Imai at the Gojozaka kiln (Source: Takeshi Kosaka)
The new brewery would also give Shoya somewhere to pass on what he has learnt. He has repeatedly acknowledged that one person cannot develop every possible brewing material alone. Other brewers need opportunities to try, gain experience and make discoveries of their own. To that end, Shoya intends to give back to the craft sake industry by making his brewery available for use by visiting brewers.
Kiln interior with stacked pottery at Gojozaka (Source: Kotosara Publishing)
Just as the old pottery kiln that continues standing at the site was once shared amongst different pottery makers, Shoya wanted the same site to continue to accommodate the needs of craftspeople who need facilities that would be difficult to establish individually.
Sake enthusiasts beyond Japan are already encountering Shoya’s work. Among LINNÉ’s early overseas stockists was Singapore’s OMU NOMU Craft Sake Bar. We also had the opportunity to attend a masterclass in July this year, hosted by Sake Samurai Cindy Bissig and have a taste of LINNÉ’s most iconic sakes. Here are our notes!
Sake Review: LINNÉ 800 Buckwheat (800 蕎麦)
Brewed with Okayama Omachi rice alongside yellow koji cultivated on heirloom buckwheat Horinouchi Zairai, and kasutori shochu distilled from sake lees. 60% rice polishing ratio. 14% ABV.
Tasting Notes
Appearance: Cloudy ivory.
Aroma: Savoury and earthy from the outset. Rich, earthy grain sweetness, with a clean citrus edge. It opens with savoury mushrooms and a rich maltiness, backed by a syrupy sweetness reminiscent of tong sui (Chinese sweet dessert soup). There’s a touch of mochi underneath, along with a gentle lactic tang. Further back, we have clean lime
peels and cloudy lemonade come through, with a faint slate-like mineral note.
Taste: Rich, thick and very rounded. It is substantial in texture. It opens with a clear rice sweetness but with pear and apple perfume sitting over the clean sweetness of rice porridge. There’s a light confectionary touch, like icing sugar dusted over pastry. A little mochi brings a gently savoury quality beneath the fruit. I do get a bit of that subtle earthiness and nuttiness reminiscent of warm buckwheat noodles or soba-yu as described by LINNÉ.
Finish: Long, clean and lightly earthy. Light and creamy rice-porridge sweetness carries through, along with some sweet herbal tea. Shiitake mushroom savouriness become more apparent here. A slate-like earthiness and a touch of grassiness in the far end.
My Thoughts
This was the most immediately flavourful and accessible of the flight for me. It is incredibly easy to appreciate and understand – that familiar sake character running through with rice sweetness, mochi, gentle fruits. There’s also plenty of substance to the body and a shade more earthiness. Mushrooms becoming more noticeable towards the finish and giving a more savory dimension to clean sweetness.
With this layers of earthiness and umami, I find this a particularly gourmet sake that might pair very well with soba dashi and smoked duck to enhance the earthiness and rice sweetness.
Sake Review: LINNÉ 800 Barley 〈Tenpai〉( 800 大麦〈天盃〉)
Brewed “ginjo-style” with Fukuoka Haruka Nijo two-row barley and white koji mould. No rice is used. 65% barley polishing ratio. 13% ABV.
Tasting Notes
Colour: Pale gold.
Aroma: It’s sweet, almost, syrupy on the nose, with the herbs and chrysanthemum threaded through honey. Opens with a rich confectionary opening of runny wild honey and sweet dates. A light sweet woodiness, somewhat reminiscent of that distinct scent of sea coconut in sweet herbal soup. Stewed red dates and ginseng leading into floral, slightly bitter fragrance of chrysanthemum tea. A faint lightly vegetal red capsicum note sits further back, alongside some salinity.
Taste: Medium-bodied, with a light vanillic sweetness and sweet spices. Honey sits alongside savoury tea and cedar, with mint and liquorice bringing out a more herbal character. As it warms up, more salinity and umami builds, adding a slightly savoury broth dimension to the sweetness with a constant aroma of honey and cedar in the back ground, then barley porridge. Tea-like and increasingly savoury, with honeyed sweetness still apparent underneath.
Finish: Light flakes of dried orange peel come through the honey, with sandalwood and cedar carrying over from the palate. Toasted coconut flakes. A fragrant and woody lingering impression. A touch of violet florals in the backdrop.
My Thoughts
This seems the most complex and layered of the three. After the Buckwheat’s relatively familiar rice sweetness, the Barley takes things towards honey, sweet herbal soup, fragrant woodiness and light florals. The nose opens with quite a confectionary impression, while the palate brings out more tea, salt and savouriness with the cedar carrying through to the end.
Sake Review: LINNÉ 800 Chestnut (800 栗)
Brewed with Shin Habutae Mochi glutinous rice alongside yellow koji cultivated on Kyotamba chestnut and infused with chestnut skins and shells. 90% rice polishing ratio. 11% ABV.
Tasting Notes
Appearance: Light Champagne gold.
Aroma: Roasty, nutty and lightly citrusy. It opens with stewed apples and roasted chestnuts. Joined by leather and baking spices – cinnamon and nutmeg – with a growing yoghurt-like creaminess and lactic tang. There’s a touch of cider vinegar on the edge of the aroma. Indistinct lighter nutty notes sitting underneath.
Taste: Very rounded in texture. It has what I might again best describe as a bright herbal-honey and glazed dango (rice cake) sweetness. Candied and caramelised chestnuts fill out the centre, accompanied by white florals and the gentle sweetness of herbal soup. There appears to be much more structure here – in the sense of a red wine. There’s a fine woodiness, a light tea-like drying grip perhaps due to the use of chestnut shells and skins. Beautifully develops into a lightly saline nuttiness beneath it all. Sauteed champignon mushrooms offering a savoury edge.
Finish: Long, woody, slightly drying. Acidity comes forward here, with honey and a growing citrus character of grapefruit and light lemon peel. Caramel, bruised apples and sweet woody notes underneath. It leaves with a retronasal aroma of a sweet, woody impression, with fresh lemon and grape fruit zest showing some brightness.
My Thoughts
The Chestnut was also very complex, and I think this is the hardest of the three to evaluate and put my finger on. There’s just nothing that tastes quite like this. You have a very indulgent roasted and caramelised chestnut dimension, some honey, chrysanthemum and savoury herbal notes but even with all that rounded sweetness, there seems to be a rather sharp tang of cider-vinegar, before sweet wood and caramel at the end bring it back towards the nuttier opening.
Interestingly, it seems that the use of chestnut skins and shells have given this a more substantial texture and structure, in the similar way as grape skins give red wine a sense of structure. There is a fine astringency and acidity that, as suggested by LINNÉ, might allow this expression to bottle-age for several years.
We would certainly be very curious how those notes begin to integrate as this chestnut sake develops. This is perhaps one of the most unusual “sakes” I’ve tasted, but the most memorable one at that!
@CharsiuCharlie
