SAKERAMA brings Craft Sake from 5 countries to Singapore – 25 and 26 July

Singapore gets its first festival built entirely around craft sake this July. SAKERAMA 2026 runs on 25 and 26 July at 37 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, pouring more than 100 craft sakes from five countries across two days. It is the first event on the island given over wholly to the craft side of the category.

SAKERAMA comes from the same team that runs Sake Matsuri, the largest sake festival in Singapore, and the leadership includes Sake Matsuri co-founders Adrian Goh and Kevin Ngan. Adrian was the first Singaporean to be named a Sake Samurai, and as Director of Inter Rice Asia he has spent more than a decade moving between heritage breweries in Japan and buyers across Southeast Asia. Kevin frames the new festival as a deliberate shift in tone rather than a repeat of what they already do. "We built Sake Matsuri around a love for sake tradition," he says. "SAKERAMA is the natural next step, a stage built for the drinkers pushing the category forward."

Steering the drinks selection is Alex, a Master Sommelier of Sake who founded OMU NOMU Craft Sake & Raw Bar and serves as the festival's Ambassador of the Craft Sake Community in Singapore. He sits within Japan's Doburoku Lovers Association and works alongside members of the Japan Craft Sake Breweries Association, and together with the founders he has picked the full list of more than 100 sakes, drawing from long-established houses and newer breweries in roughly equal measure. His pitch for the weekend is broad. "SAKERAMA is the full spectrum of craft sake in one weekend," he says, "a parallel path for the future of sake, where tradition, free-spirited creativity and cross-disciplinary brewing open up limitless, mind blowing possibilities."

So what actually counts as craft sake? It is a rice-based category that took shape as a defined movement around 2021. Brewers keep the foundations of Japanese sake-making, rice, koji, water, fermentation and the brewery's own hand, then step outside the legal and stylistic lines that box in conventional seishu. In practice that means unpressed doburoku, co-fermentations with fruit, herbs, hops or botanicals, brews built on alternative koji, and expressions that lean on lower-polished or ordinary table rice. The point is less "small-batch sake" and more sake brewing used as a starting platform: still rooted in Japanese fermentation, but looser about ingredients, region and the brewer's own taste.

The festival splits that spectrum into a few strands you can taste your way through. Doburoku is the oldest of them, a completely unpressed and unfiltered sake that keeps the whole fermented mash, cloudy and thick, with a lively flavour that Alex calls the "raw soul of sake." It predates the pressed styles most people drink today, and he has made a point of putting this older form of the drink in front of festival-goers.

Then there are the crossover brews, where rice ferments alongside hops and botanicals and the result sits somewhere between sake and craft beer. These are not fruit liqueurs with flavour added at the end. The fresh ingredients go into the fermentation itself, which is what gives them their layered character.

The third strand is geographic. SAKERAMA leans on the fact that sake is now brewed well beyond Japan, and the list runs from local outfit Orchid Sake Brewery to Dassai Blue, the New York brewery set up by Dassai Shuzo, to Thailand's Devanom, which makes sake alongside a reworked version of sato, a rustic village ferment built on sticky rice.

The setting is an industrial warehouse at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, and the programme around the drinks matches that. There is YOSAKOI Lah!, a contemporary take on Japanese dance, plus live DJ sets and sake-based cocktails. Drinks work on a pay-by-the-cup system: tokens cost $5 each, pours start from a single token, and one token buys you across any of the vendors without fuss. For food, Ye Olde Cow and The Oyster Cart handle the eating side of the day.

Anyone who wants to go past the tasting can sit in on the Craft Sake Workshops running through the weekend, which get into the techniques and thinking behind the list. Entry to a workshop starts at three tokens.

Tickets open at S$38 for a one-day pass, which covers entry on either the Saturday or the Sunday, one complimentary 80ml pour, access to all 100-plus sakes and the full programme. For S$65 you add a bottle of the SAKERAMA x Orchid Sake Brewery Yuzu Sake, a collaboration made for the festival's first edition and sold only as part of that package. A weekend pass covering both days is S$68, and a bundle of five standard one-day passes is S$175. Both days run from 12pm to 10pm. Tickets purchasable at https://sakerama.sg/pages/tickets, and the festival posts updates on Instagram at @sakerama.sg.

Before the festival, SAKERAMA is running an islandwide gachapon campaign across seven venues, where a qualifying spend earns a play and every play wins something, from festival tickets and discounts to perks tied to each spot. The venues are Fatt Choy Eating House on Haji Lane, Omu Nomu at Concourse Skyline on Beach Road, Koki Alternative Bread Bar on Duxton Road, Braveheart Sake Originals on Tanjong Pagar Road, Tokyo Brewlab also at Concourse Skyline, The Oyster Cart on Opal Crescent, and Ye Olde Cow, a mobile truck whose weekly stops are posted at @yeoldecow. Full terms are at https://sakerama.sg/pages/where-to-play.

Kanpai!

88 Bamboo Editorial Team