Why export the sake when you could export the brewing?

This is allegedly the question being asked by megabrewer Hakutsuru, known for their sprawling and highly automated multi-site operation in Nada.

But did you know that they also operate a teeny tiny (37 m2) completely autonomous brewery inside their museum? Opened in Sep 2024 to try out new yeasts, experiment with craft sake-style additions and produce small-volume custom orders, HAKUTSURU SAKE CRAFT is stepping up alongside its much bigger brewery brothers to make a daiginjō to be submitted for appraisal in 2025.

The effort is being overseen by Mitsuhiro Ban, one of Hakutsuru’s tōji (and probably your guide if you’ve visited). He noted that although he believes the mini-brewery can make great competition sake they’ll have to see how it goes as it’s their first time. Their batch will yield a mere 200–250 x 720 ml bottles.

SAKE CRAFT is particularly important to Ban as somewhere to trial data-based sake brewing. Hakutsuru, along with many other Nada breweries, suffered massive damage to their old wooden buildings in the 1995 Hanshin Earthquake.

Breweries are also vulnerable to other disasters, such as fire and flood, which can mean the loss of precious brewing records. This was one of the reasons behind the release of Moromi Yell, the Excel spreadsheet developed by the Nagoya Regional Tax Bureau to replace paper brewing logs. The other risk they identified was the loss of key personnel, which would leave the brewery unable to replicate their usual style of sake. The Bureau hopes that by charting the brewing progression logs and trying to recreate the same curves during fermentation the brewery can, through sticking to the the numbers, approximate the spirit of their previously brewed sake.

And such sake brewing data could of course be sold or otherwise transferred overseas, with the tiny HAKUTSURU SAKE CRAFT as a model for how to build a sake microbrewery…
———-
日本酒最大手・白鶴が視野に入れる 「醸造所を輸出する」戦略 (Asahi Shinbun Digital, 24 Jan 2025, full article paywalled)
【日本酒（LBS）】国税局が酒蔵をコンサル 業界守るツール「もろみエール」(TV Aichi, 18 Mar 2024)

Moromi Yell (in Japanese) is freely available for download from the NTA site, and an English version is coming soon!
Ban also has his own YouTube channel where he talks about brewing at Hakutsuru (not updated for some years) with two videos are subtitled in English.

I’m not sure how developed any plans are for selling a ready-made sake brewing process or mini-brewery, but as anyone making sake outside of Japan will tell you there are many issues around water, rice, yeast and particularly equipment that would make it hard to simply copy-and-paste whatever HAKUTSURU SAKE CRAFT is doing.