If you subscribe to John Gauntner’s Sake Industry News, you’ll already know about Moromi Yell, a recent effort to bring sake brewers into the digital age.
Although before you get too excited about “digital”, it’s an Excel sheet developed by the Nagoya Regional Taxation Bureau that comes with data from former Gold Award winners at the Japan Sake Awards (全国新酒鑑評会, zenkoku shinshu kanpyoukai, also called the National New Sake Appraisals).
Released in January 2024 and available for download from the National Tax Agency (NTA) site, the tool is used by a number of breweries in the Tokai region as a replacement for paper logbooks and also as a way to compare data from different batches or years.
Breweries hope that it will help to make brewing styles more replicable, instead of relying on intuition or on key members of the brewing team who may be approaching retirement, and also enable faster decision-making when managing the main ferment.
Another advantage is that data can be backed up or stored off-site – Mizutani Shuzo in Aisai, Aichi Prefecture, lost many of their logbooks in a fire and are entering what data they still have in Moromi Yell before starting to brew in leased space at another brewery.
Chart showing the number of sake breweries and tax revenue they generate, both in decline. (Aichi News, YouTube)
Kenichiro Tajima, chief of the Nagoya Regional Taxation Bureau’s Office of Analysis and Brewing Technology, sees Moromi Yell as a way to support experienced brewers, maintain quality and cope with lack of manpower.
An Aichi News feature from March 2024 suggests another motive on the part of the NTA, namely tax revenue. Quoting the NTA, they put the number of sake breweries in 2011 at 1,260, falling to 1,139 in 2021 due to sake falling out of favour in Japan and breweries closing when there is no-one to take over from retiring owners. Associated tax revenue also dropped from JPY 69.5 billion to JPY 41.9 billion over those 10 years.
Alcohol was responsible for a large proportion of tax revenue in the Meiji era, but now accounts for only around 4% of the total.
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Japan’s Sake Breweries Enter Digital Era with Production Aid; Optimizes Timing of Key Steps of Process (The Japan News by the Yomiuri Shinbun, 19 Sep 2024, English)
Sake Industry News Issue #121 (1 October 2024, English)
もろみエールについて (National Tax Agency site, Japanese)
Aichi News (18 March 2024, Japanese)
Japanese Sake and Taxes (1 Apr 2023, Hakushika Memorial Museum of Sake, English)
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