sake brewery

More sake photos – this time of a fantastic brewery in Chiba. The sake-kura is called Terada Honke. Many thanks to photographer and friend Everett Kennedy Brown for the introduction.

The special thing about the brewery is  their completely traditional methods. They use organic rice and natural sake yeast that lives in the walls and air of the brewery.

Terada Honke sake brewery

Like other sake breweries they mostly make sake during the winter months, but I was lucky enough to catch them preparing a small batch. This rice had just been steamed.

making sake

Here it is transferred to a cedar-wood lined room.

preparing the sake rice

This is the owner and manager of the brewery, Terada Keisuke. He had an epiphany during a bout of bad health 25 years ago and vowed henceforth only to make “real” sake.

sake brewery manager

One of the workers at the sake brewery.

sake brewery worker

The brewery’s sake is sold under the brand “gonin musume” (five daughters). Terada told me that the sake-kura hasn’t had sons for three generations. He has three daughters, when he got married he was adopted into his wife’s family, as was her father before that.

He also told me that drinking the sake is “as delicious as drinking with five young women”.

If you are feeling adventurous I recommend this sake. An attempt to recreate medieval temple sake, it is a slightly alarming translucent yellow and quite bitter sweet. But it’s delicious.

The full set of sake brewery photos on my archive.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 10:52 pm. It is filed under food and drink, my photos and tagged with sake brewery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.