Things that make you go hmmm

While I am the only person involved in this newsletter and all views are definitely my own, this is more speculative than I normally get. But a few things got me thinking.

As I mentioned, I used to live in the Ena area so I contacted someone I know and asked them about Hazama Shuzo. 

The answer I received was that the brewery was taken over by an alcohol wholesaler from another prefecture some years ago and trained by a well-known brewery in Yamaguchi that has links to an even more well-known brewery in Yamagata that is famous for its fruity, ethyl caproate-dominated style. 

The comment my friend finished with was almost identical to one I’d heard from a kuramoto I visited last year… it’s a shame that IWC and Kura Master are starting to give awards to the same sake that win in Japan.

This made me think several things…

If IWC and Kura Master really are rating these ethyl caproate-heavy sake higher, why? Are they (knowingly or not) drifting into alignment with Japanese competitions? Have the judges somehow picked up that this is what’s trendy? (IWC does have some Japanese judges but they’re not in the majority, and Kura Master seems to have no Japanese judges.) Are these sake just easier to identify and evaluate than others? I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the Kura Master results in detail yet (they’re here) but the Prix Alliance Gastronomie 2024 listed at the top of the results page went to Shata Shuzo’s Tengumai Yamahai Jikomi Junmaishu which is exactly the kind of thing I want to see held up as an example of a great sake with fantastic potential for pairing.

Several small brewers I’ve spoken to seem utterly over ethyl caproate, and frustrated that it’s so popular when it has no relevance to how they brew. (One claimed that some breweries literally add the chemical ethyl caproate to sake, I have no idea if that could be true but it sounded outrageous.)

My Ena friend also pointed out that in Japan, these aromatic sake are not session sake. Their aroma may be appealing those new to sake, but it also makes them too challenging to be drunk in any quantity. [But unfortunately Europe is full of people who don’t know sake and promoters trying to interest them, plus the pricing makes it hard to drink it in volume as well…]

And it’s a double blow to breweries whose sake isn’t heavy on the ginjo-ka – they’re not recognised in Japan, and now it looks like they have fewer chances abroad as well.