The 全国新酒鑑評会 — the National New Sake Appraisal, often rendered in English as the Japan Sake Awards — is one of the country's oldest and most watched sake competitions, held every year since 1911. Today it is co-run by the National Research Institute of Brewing (NRIB, 酒類総合研究所) and the Japan Sake Brewers Association Central Committee. Breweries submit a single freshly brewed entry, expert judges taste blind, and the best entries earn a Gold Award (金賞). Plenty of breweries win Gold once. Far fewer win it again the next year, and the next. Below are the 50 breweries that took Gold in all three years — 2022, 2023, and 2024 — Japan's most consistent performers at the national appraisal.
What the NRIB award actually is
The appraisal is run by a government-affiliated research institute that studies brewing science and, once a year, stages the national tasting the whole industry follows. A few points are worth getting right, because English write-ups often blur them:
- It judges one competition entry, not a brewery's whole lineup. Each brewery submits a single sake brewed specifically for the appraisal — overwhelmingly Daiginjo, made from heavily polished rice and fermented cold and slow. It does not tell you anything directly about the everyday bottles that brewery sells.
- Gold (金賞) is a subset of the winners, not the whole pool. Entries judged excellent become 入賞酒 (award-winning sake); the best of those are flagged 金賞 (Gold). In 2024 (令和6), 809 entries were submitted, 410 reached 入賞, and 202 earned Gold — so Gold is roughly the top quarter, awarded to every entry that clears the bar rather than to a single champion.
- It is an annual, blind, expert appraisal — not a popularity contest or a consumer poll. The judges are brewing scientists and licensed assessors.
A single Gold, then, tells you a brewery can produce one outstanding tank of competition Daiginjo in a given year. Useful, but limited.
Why "three years running" is the number that matters
Any brewery can get lucky once: a single great tank, a kind rice harvest, a panel that happened to favour that year's style. Sake is brutally sensitive to variables that shift every season — the rice crop, the water, the weather across a 30-plus-day fermentation, the health of the kōji. Repeating a Gold across three separate brewing years means a brewery isn't catching luck; it has a process it can reproduce. That consistency is what shows up in the bottles on a shelf, not just in a one-off competition tank.
How demanding is the three-peat? Demanding enough that some of the most famous names in sake miss it. Dassai (獺祭, Yamaguchi), Dewazakura (出羽桜, Yamagata), Jikon (而今, Mie), Shimeharitsuru (〆張鶴, Niigata), and Hidakami (日高見, Miyagi) all won Gold in 2022 and 2023 — then did not take Gold in 2024. Marquee reputations, two strong years, and still no clean three-year streak. That's the bar the list below clears.
The 50 breweries with a 2022–2024 Gold streak
Every brewery here earned Gold (金賞) at the NRIB appraisal in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The list is built by intersecting the official 金賞 winners from all three years, matched by corporate registration number, then grouped by prefecture (north to south, the order NRIB itself uses). Where a standard romanisation exists it's given; where there's no settled English name, the brand is left in Japanese rather than inventing one.
| Brand | 銘柄 | Prefecture |
|---|---|---|
| Nanbu Bijin | 南部美人 | Iwate |
| Washinoo | 鷲の尾 | Iwate |
| Urakasumi | 浦霞 | Miyagi |
| Zaō | 蔵王 | Miyagi |
| Ippaku Suisei | 一白水成 | Akita |
| Tenju | 天壽 | Akita |
| Harukasumi | 春霞 | Akita |
| Ginrin | 銀鱗 | Akita |
| Takashimizu | 髙清水 | Akita |
| Eikō Fuji | 栄光冨士 | Yamagata |
| Shūhō | 秀鳳 | Yamagata |
| Yonetsuru | 米鶴 | Yamagata |
| — | 花羽陽 | Yamagata |
| Abukuma | あぶくま | Fukushima |
| Ninki-ichi | 人気一 | Fukushima |
| — | 会津吉の川 | Fukushima |
| Kiri-Tsukuba | 霧筑波 | Ibaraki |
| Sakuragawa | 桜川 | Tochigi |
| Sawahime | 澤姫 | Tochigi |
| Kaika | 開華 | Tochigi |
| — | 秘幻 | Gunma |
| Mikadomatsu | 帝松 | Saitama |
| — | 東魁盛 | Chiba |
| Morimasu | 盛升 | Kanagawa |
| Daisekkei | 大雪渓 | Nagano |
| Matsuo | 松尾 | Nagano |
| Okuhida | 奥飛騨 | Gifu |
| Zaku | 作 | Mie |
| Taga | 多賀 | Shiga |
| Matsu no Tsukasa | 松の司 | Shiga |
| Gekkeikan | 月桂冠 | Kyoto |
| Kizakura | 黄桜 | Kyoto |
| — | 仙介 | Hyōgo |
| Ōzeki | 大関 | Hyōgo |
| Nihonsakari | 日本盛 | Hyōgo |
| Hakutsuru | 白鶴 | Hyōgo |
| Fukuju | 福壽 | Hyōgo |
| Kiku-Masamune | 菊正宗 | Hyōgo |
| Kuromatsu Hakushika | 黒松白鹿 | Hyōgo |
| Tatsuriki | 龍力 | Hyōgo |
| Sankō Masamune | 三光正宗 | Okayama |
| Sakura Fubuki | 桜吹雪 | Hiroshima |
| Shinrai | 神雷 | Hiroshima |
| Hakubotan | 白牡丹 | Hiroshima |
| Suishin | 醉心 | Hiroshima |
| Gokyō | 五橋 | Yamaguchi |
| — | 長陽福娘 | Yamaguchi |
| Tsukasa Botan | 司牡丹 | Kōchi |
| Bunkajin | 文佳人 | Kōchi |
| Nabeshima | 鍋島 | Saga |
A few of these names will be familiar to anyone who buys good sake. Nanbu Bijin (南部美人) from Iwate is a long-standing export favourite. Nabeshima (鍋島), out of Saga's tiny family-run Fukuchiyo Brewery, won the International Wine Challenge's Champion Sake title in 2011 and has been a cult name since. Zaku (作) from Mie was poured for world leaders at the 2016 Ise-Shima G7 summit. When breweries of that caliber sit on a three-year list, it confirms what their reputations already suggest.
Craft names and big houses, side by side
Notice how many household brands are here — Hakutsuru (白鶴), Gekkeikan (月桂冠), Ōzeki (大関), Kiku-Masamune (菊正宗), Kizakura (黄桜). The big historic houses of Nada (in Hyōgo) and Fushimi (in Kyoto) still field serious competition Daiginjo, even though it isn't the supermarket bottle that wins the medal. The list also leans toward a few regions: eight of the fifty brew in Hyōgo, home of the Nada district, with Akita (five), Yamagata (four), and Tochigi (three) close behind — a rough map of where competition brewing runs deepest.
One thing the list deliberately does not do is rank these breweries against each other. The appraisal gives Gold to every entry that clears the bar, so a streak means "consistently among the best Daiginjo submitted," not "the single best sake in Japan." For a drinker that's the more useful reading: you're not chasing one trophy bottle, you're identifying breweries whose top-end work holds up season after season.
So what do you do with this?
A list of winners is only useful if it points you somewhere. If you're new to good sake, start with bottles that are easy to find and forgiving to drink — that's what our beginner's guide is built for. If you'd rather read specific tasting notes before you buy, our sake reviews break bottles down by flavour and who they're for. And to look up any brand by name, the sake brands directory is the place to start.
A Gold Award is a signal, not a promise you'll love the bottle. But three Golds in a row tells you a brewery has its craft genuinely under control — a very good place to start looking.
The three-year list on this page was rebuilt directly from the NRIB's own 入賞酒目録 (official award directories) for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 appraisals, by taking the breweries marked 金賞 (☆) in every one of the three years and matching them on corporate registration number. You can check the underlying results yourself at the NRIB's pages for 2022 (令和4), 2023 (令和5), and 2024 (令和6) — each links the official directory PDF marking the Gold (☆) entries. The appraisal is co-run by the National Research Institute of Brewing (酒類総合研究所, nrib.go.jp) and the Japan Sake Brewers Association Central Committee.