Welcome to Issue #125 of SIN.
There's no two ways around it, this is a “craft sake”-heavy issue. What do we mean by “craft sake”? Well, that alone is a question that needs some answering, and we’ll address this in a moment. However, the one thing that is clear is that “sake-adjacent” products are gaining attention.
It was just a few years ago when the National Tax Agency announced that it would be offering licenses for breweries to produce nihonshu for export purposes only while being allowed to produce “sake adjacent” or similar products that fall outside the seishu category for the domestic market. At the time, many were skeptical that anyone would go for such a license.
On paper it seemed to make little sense; produce nihonshu for the overseas market (despite not having any proven track record or brand identity as a producer in Japan), and produce sake with adjuncts such as fruits and herbs, or doburoku-style beverages for a domestic market that never asked for it? Umm, sure, where do we sign up?
Well, it turns out that there were folks interested in pursuing these licenses, and there were importers willing to bring in their products, and there is also a proven domestic market interested in these sake adjacent products.
It has been unsubtly suggested by many that these new breweries are playing the long-game in hoping that the Tax Agency will reward their tenacity and business acumen with a fully-fledged seishu brewing license at some point down the track if they can prove their worth. In fact, a number of these brewers have said openly that obtaining a seishu license is their endgame.
This side of things will play out in time, however in the meantime, for an industry that has long had to work with educating domestic and international consumers in terminology, defining “craft sake” is going to prove a troublesome thorn in its side - however small that thorn may be.
As discussed here at SIN before, one of the shadows hanging over the definition of “craft sake” is the fact that the term itself has been trademarked by Mottox, a wine importer and sake distribution company based in Osaka. So, as purveyors of the term “craft sake” we reached out to Mottox to ask how they approach the use of the term and their feelings on how other enterprises use it.
Mottox replied as follows:
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