神亀酒造Shinkame Shuzo

In 1987 the man everyone at Shinkame called Senmu decided the brewery would stop making anything but junmai. No alcohol added, no blended bottlings, no cheaper line to keep the lights on. Pure rice sake, the whole output, or nothing.

That was a reckless thing to commit to in 1987. Junmai needs far more rice per bottle than the alcohol-added sake that filled most of the market, the kind born of wartime shortages and never fully retired. Going all junmai meant spending more on raw material for every bottle while the rest of the industry sold volume cheap. Ogawahara Yoshimasa did it anyway, and Shinkame became the first brewery in postwar Japan to brew junmai and only junmai.

The brewery itself is much older than that decision. It was founded in 1848 in what is now Hasuda City, Saitama, under the old shop name Iseya Honten, on the plain north of Tokyo. The name Shinkame, "sacred turtle," is said to come from a turtle that lived in a pond once sitting behind the brewery. For most of its first century it was an ordinary regional kura. The turn came with Senmu.

Ogawahara was not chasing fashion. He was after a kind of sake that improves with age and warms well, the opposite of the cold, fruity, ginjo-forward style that would later sweep the market. Shinkame ages much of its junmai for years before release, and the house style runs full and savory rather than aromatic. The sakenowa flavor profile bears this out: 神亀 reads rich and full-bodied, low on the fragrant and light axes. This is sake built for the dinner table and for warming, not for sniffing in a tasting glass.

The everyday line carries the brewery name, 神亀. The more polished label is ひこ孫, Hikomago, which means "grandchild," and it leans on the same convictions: rice, koji, water, time. Ogawahara liked to say he wanted to end sake's postwar era, and he kept saying it until he died in 2017. The brewery still makes nothing but junmai. Whatever else the next generation changes, that line has held.

Key facts

• Founded 1848 in present-day Hasuda City, Saitama Prefecture, originally under the shop name Iseya Honten
• The name 神亀 ("sacred turtle") is said to derive from a turtle that once lived in a pond behind the brewery
• In 1987, under Ogawahara Yoshimasa (known by the nickname "Senmu," a managing-director sobriquet he kept throughout his career), Shinkame became the first brewery in postwar Japan to convert its entire output to junmai (pure rice) sake, with no alcohol-added or blended bottlings
• House style favors full-bodied, savory, age-worthy junmai meant for food and for warming, rather than the cold, aromatic ginjo style; the sakenowa profile reads rich and full-bodied, low on fragrant/light
• Flagship labels: 神亀 (Shinkame, the everyday junmai) and ひこ孫 (Hikomago, the more polished line)
• Ogawahara Yoshimasa championed several practices early, among them unfiltered draft sake, aged junmai, and low-polish brewing; he died in 2017
• Note: sources differ on how to count Ogawahara's generation within the family, and his birth year (commonly given as 1946) is not consistently confirmed, so neither is stated as settled here