長州酒造Choshu Shuzo

The company that owns this brewery makes solar panels. Choshu Sangyo, a Yamaguchi manufacturer of photovoltaic systems, had no business in sake until it heard that a small local kura was about to close for good. Kodama Shuzo, in the Kikukawa district of Shimonoseki, had brewed a label called Kikukawa but had long since stopped making sake of its own. Rather than let the license and the building go quiet, Choshu Sangyo took the whole thing over.

That happened in 2018. What followed was not a careful restart of the old brand but a clean break. The company tore things down and built a new brewery on the site, and it went looking for someone to run it.

The someone it found was Fujioka Miki. She had learned the craft the hard way, working her way through breweries in Nara, Kagawa, and Mie, and at the Kawatsuru brewery in Kagawa she had risen from the floor to toji, the master brewer who answers for everything in the tank. At Choshu she joined when the lot was still bare ground. For roughly two years she helped design the building she would brew in, then waited for it to be finished before she could make a drop.

The first sake came in the autumn of 2020. They called it 天美, Tenbi, a name stitched from two older words: one character from Amaterasu, the sun deity tied in myth to the growing of rice, and one from 美禄, an old poetic word for sake. Fujioka left the brewery on November 30, 2023; since then Choshu has continued to brew Tenbi under a new team built mainly around local staff.

What is in the bottle is all junmai. Tenbi runs across a tokubetsu junmai, a junmai ginjo, and a junmai daiginjo, leaning on Yamada Nishiki along with the Yamaguchi-bred rice Saito no Shizuku. A rotating series of limited junmai daiginjo bottlings then swaps in other rice one at a time, among them Aiyama and Omachi. The sakenowa flavor profile reads balanced rather than loud: a touch fragrant, a touch dry, with body and richness sitting near the middle. It is a modern, clean style, the kind made to be poured cold and to go with a meal, not a heavy sake built for warming.

For a brewery a few years old, Tenbi found shelves and drinkers quickly, which says something about how far a careful first vintage can travel now. The interesting part is the shape of the thing: an energy company, a brewer who built her own kura from the ground up, and a name borrowed from the sun.

Key facts

• The brewery was newly established in 2018, when Choshu Sangyo Co., Ltd., a Yamaguchi-based solar power systems manufacturer, took over the license and site of the closing Kodama Shuzo in the Kikukawa district of Shimonoseki, which had brewed the old "Kikukawa" (菊川) label
• Rather than reviving the old brand, the company demolished and rebuilt, then launched an entirely new label, 天美 (Tenbi)
• Founding toji: Fujioka Miki (藤岡美樹), who trained at breweries in Nara, Kagawa, and Mie, and rose to toji at Kawatsuru Shuzo in Kagawa before being recruited here; she joined while the new brewery was still bare ground and spent about two years on its planning. She left Choshu Shuzo on November 30, 2023; since then the brewery has continued brewing Tenbi under a new team built mainly around local staff (no successor toji has been publicly named)
• First Tenbi was brewed and released around autumn 2020 (sources differ on whether the initial release should be dated 2019 or 2020, so it is given here as "around 2020")
• The name 天美 combines a character from Amaterasu (天照), the sun deity associated with rice cultivation, and one from 美禄, an old word for sake
• Lineup is entirely junmai: tokubetsu junmai, junmai ginjo, and junmai daiginjo, built mainly on Yamada Nishiki and the Yamaguchi-bred Saito no Shizuku (西都の雫); a rotating series of limited junmai daiginjo bottlings also uses single rice varieties such as Aiyama (愛山) and Omachi (雄町)
• House style is a clean, modern junmai: the sakenowa profile reads balanced, slightly fragrant and slightly dry, with body and richness near the middle, built for the table and for cool serving rather than for warming