佐浦Saura

There is a yeast strain that turns up in ginjo recipes all over Japan, and it came out of one moromi tank in a port town in Miyagi. Brewers know it as Kyokai No. 12, or sometimes just "the Urakasumi yeast." It was lifted from a ginjo fermentation at this brewery, prized for the clean, restrained aromatics it gave, and eventually the brewers' association registered it so anyone could use it. Most people who drink a fragrant ginjo today have no idea a strain born in Shiogama may be doing some of the work in the glass.

The brewery behind it is Saura, founded in 1724. The family did not start in sake. Before that they made koji, the mold-grown rice that drives every fermentation, and in 1724 they acquired the brewing rights and turned to making the finished drink themselves. They settled into the role of supplying sacred sake to Shiogama Jinja, the thousand-year-old shrine that anchors the town, and that tie to the shrine still shapes how the brewery talks about itself.

The brand name came much later, and by way of a poem. "Urakasumi" means something like "mist over the bay," lifted from a verse attributed to Minamoto no Sanetomo, the third Kamakura shogun who wrote poetry, about spring haze drifting across the Shiogama shore. The brewery adopted the two characters for an elevated grade of sake in the Taisho era and the name stuck.

What the bottle tastes like follows from that yeast story. The sakenowa profile for 浦霞 sits in the middle of every axis rather than spiking on any one — moderately rich, fairly mild, not loud or fruity. This is restraint by design. Saura makes a clean, quiet, food-leaning sake meant to sit beside Shiogama's tuna and oysters rather than shout over them.

The house is still run by the family. Saura Koichi, the thirteenth-generation head, took over as president in 2001 and was still in the chair when the brewery marked its 300th year in 2024. He has pushed Urakasumi outward, into export and into the international conversation about Japanese sake, without letting go of the shrine-and-bay identity the name carries.

Key facts

• Founded in 1724 (Kyoho 9) in Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture; the Saura family worked as koji makers before acquiring brewing rights and turning to sake themselves
• Long served as a sacred-sake (御神酒) brewer for Shiogama Jinja, the regional first-rank shrine with over a thousand years of history
• The flagship brand 浦霞 (Urakasumi, roughly "mist over the bay") takes its name from a poem attributed to the Kamakura-era shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo about the Shiogama coast; the name was adopted for a premium grade in the Taisho era
• A ginjo yeast separated from Urakasumi's fermentation was later registered by the brewers' association as Kyokai No. 12, also known as the "Urakasumi yeast," and spread to breweries across Japan; the brewery brands itself "12号酵母発祥の酒蔵" (the kura where No. 12 yeast began)
• House style is clean, balanced, and food-oriented; the sakenowa profile reads middle-of-the-range across axes rather than spiking on fragrance or body
• Run by the founding family to the present; Saura Koichi, the 13th-generation head, became president in 2001 and led the brewery through its 300th anniversary in 2024
• Note: sources give the 13th-generation president's birth year as either 1962 or 1964, and the exact year the No. 12 yeast was first separated (commonly placed in the mid-1960s) is not consistently fixed, so neither is stated as settled here