Japan has a rice surplus on its hands, two summers after the "Reiwa rice panic" began. At a long-established sake brewery in Gifu Prefecture, the squeeze has not eased.
Tamaseido Shuzo, founded in 1806 in the town of Yoro, has won gold prizes repeatedly at new-sake appraisal competitions. Its Reisen junmai daiginjo, brewed with the area's very soft groundwater, has been served on JAL international first-class flights and in the airline's lounges.
Brewing for the season began in October. Inside one tank, foam had climbed high up the wall. Rice, water and koji ferment together for about 20 days, and the brewery fills roughly 100,000 one-sho bottles a season.
Yamada Hideyuki, who works at the brewery, said the foam showed the mash was fermenting hard. Asked about the sweet smell in the room, he said: "That's the smell of fermentation."
Milling in-house, rare for a regional brewery
The brewery also runs its own rice mill, which Yamada said is unusual for a sake maker outside the big producing regions. Milling strips away the outer layers of the grain to leave only the starchy core, and the work demands close attention.
"It's a rice mill for sake, a completely different machine from one for eating rice," he said. "People often tell us it's rare for a regional brewery to have one. If we're going to be particular about making sake, we want to do the milling ourselves."
The rice is top-grade Yamada Nishiki from Hyogo Prefecture, the most prized sake rice in the country.
Farmers switched to table rice
When eating rice ran short during the Reiwa rice panic, many farmers switched their production to table rice, cutting the supply of sake rice and driving its price up. At Tamaseido Shuzo, the purchase price of sake rice has risen about 1.5 times in the past few years.
Asked whether a 50% increase is hard to absorb, Yamada said the brewery raised its prices after doing what it could itself. The increase came in April.
“We don't want a price rise to mean people stop drinking sake. We want them to keep drinking it. It was a painful decision, but we raised our prices.”Yamada Hideyuki, Tamaseido Shuzo
The pressure on sake rice suggests the rice panic is some way from being fully over.