午夜剧场

haccoba -Craft Sake Brewery- produces sake based on a free brewing style similar to craft beer. Strictly speaking, it is classified as "Other Brewed Liquors" rather than Japanese sake (Seishu).

To begin with, a license is required to produce alcohol in Japan. Furthermore, it is currently impossible for new players to obtain a license to produce Japanese sake.

Therefore, there are two main ways to start a sake brewery in Japan. One is to take over an existing brewery through business succession. The other is to do what we do: "utilize a license for something other than sake to produce alcohol using sake-making methods."

The category of "Other Brewed Liquors" possesses a literal chaos, as it is not confined to specific types of alcohol.

While maintaining the traditional Japanese sake brewing method using rice and koji, we add fruits and herbs during the fermentation process to enjoy differences in flavor and aroma. This raises the question, "Is that even sake?" but I actually believe it brings us closer to the origins of Japanese fermentation culture. In the past, when licenses were not required for sake making in Japan, households freely used ingredients other than rice and koji to enjoy making their own alcohol. By pursuing the fermentation culture of such a free era, we are chasing the romantic ideal that we might arrive at the ultimate taste.

The other form of chaos is the location of our brewery: Odaka District, Minamisoma City, Fukushima Prefecture. This is a town where the population temporarily dropped to zero due to evacuations following the nuclear accident caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake ten years ago.

In a town where daily life was suspended for several years, lifestyle and culture were reset. Now, the local residents are in the stage of carefully restarting their lives step by step.

A "town that became zero" is a chaotic situation, but from another perspective, it is a modern frontier where "we can pioneer the kind of town we want to live in ourselves."

In such a town, we are taking on the challenge of starting a sake brewery—an institution that has shaped Japanese culture and aesthetic sensibilities—from scratch.

I believe that sharing "supremely delicious sake" with a free brewing style from this land will serve as a catalyst for people around the world to feel closer to "fermentation culture" and "climate change and energy issues."