Commitment to Quality

Rice

Sake rice is different from rice for eating, and while decent sake can be made from regular rice, truly great sake calls for proper brewing rice. At Koshi no Kanbai, we use the best sake rice available, including plenty of the famous variety Yamadanishiki from Hyogo Prefecture.
Brewing rice is different from regular rice in many ways, including size, high starch content, low fat and protein content, and a physical structure that allows fat and protein to be milled away so that only starch remains. It is more difficult to grow and more expensive, but is well worth the added trouble and expense. We cannot compromise when making Koshi no Kanbai.
Together with our passion for sake brewing and the trusting relationship we have developed with the rice growers over the years, we use our technical brewing prowess to make the most of the superior quality of our raw materials.
At Ishimoto Sake Brewery, we use 100% proper brewing rice. We obtain the highest grades of it; in fact, we use four of the top six grades. And on top of procuring the best rice, we constantly adjust our brewing to fit the quality and special characteristics of each year’s harvests.
We also mill almost all of our rice ourselves, as doing so allows us to directly confirm the quality and make the necessary fine adjustments based on what we observe. We mill the rice to a high degree to ensure clean flavors. And instead of aiming for maximum yields, we instead  focus on fermenting no further than is necessary, and thereby create a sake that is elegant, fine-grained, and lower in acidity.

Water

Great water is essential to great sake. Without a copious source of fresh, clean water, good sake cannot be made. We use pure water that traces its source to Niigata’s lush natural environment, with its voluminous snow and vast woodlands that nurture and protect it and supply our rivers, including the nearby Agano River. We then filter it ourselves, to do all that we can to ensure safety and purity in our sake.

Brewing Methods & Technology

Seigo Ishimoto, our second-generation president, expressed the following based on his experience as a competitive boat racer in his student days.
“It is imperative that everyone that makes sake here has a vision of the ideal for Koshi no Kanbai, and that we all row that boat together. Even if each oarsman in the boat is individually strong, the boat will not go anywhere if they are not all facing in the same direction. In that sense, sake brewing is like rowing. The goal is far in the distance, and the path is arduous, and so nothing is more important than continuing to row with all one’s might toward it.”
Today as well, the brewing staff all have the same objective and even the same preferences, and so they diligently work to constantly improve and pass on their skills. Perhaps “attention to detail” best describes how we do things.
As Koshi no Kanbai is brewed, each stop of the process is constantly checked by experienced craftsmen, using highly refined senses honed across years of experience.
In order to provide them with the leeway to do this, we have developed and utilize unique and well-designed equipment – some of it only found at our brewery – that performs much of the actual labor. Much of this equipment has been designed by us, using the same attention to detail that goes into brewing. All of it has been well thought out to the last detail.
The spirit of traditional sake brewing is expressed through modern means here, always with the goal of increasing quality and maintaining consistency.

Equipment

Our modern equipment lets us consistently provide our customers with high quality sake.

Climate Control: Reproducing cold-weather brewing

We brew using equipment with which we can easily control the temperature via special fermentation tanks and air coolers. This allows us to ferment at low temperatures for extended periods of time, enabling us to consistently brew mellow and clean sake.

Long-term low-temperature maturation

In order to bring out the fullness of sake flavors and the original “umami” richness of the rice, as well as harmony in the sake, maturing at low temperatures for long periods of time is indispensable.

Clean Room

We use clean room technology to help ensure we can supply sake that is both delicious and safe. Quality control inspections are carried out multiple times, both visually and via modern image processing techniques, before shipping.

Environmentally Friendly Equipment

A brewery designed to work with gravity
Our brewery is designed so that rice steaming takes place on the third floor, koji and fermenting mash are created on the second floor, and filtration, pasteurization and storage take place on the first floor, ensuring an efficient process that flows with gravity, thereby not wasting electricity in moving things around.
Various Energy-saving Equipment
Motors that are continuously running are designed to use less energy than normal. We use environmentally friendly modern refrigeration equipment. Ice from the water that we use in brewing is made at night to minimize the burden on the power distribution network. More and more of the the large pieces of climate control equipment are designed to minimize carbon dioxide output.

The Garden

The many trees that have been planted on our brewery grounds melt into the scenery of the surrounding region. There is so much greenery around, and not even a single billboard or sign, so that one would not even realize there is a sake brewery here.