賀茂鶴酒造Kamotsuru Shuzo

When Barack Obama and Shinzo Abe sat down at Sukiyabashi Jiro in April 2014, the sake poured into Obama's cup was a daiginjo from Hiroshima with flakes of pure gold leaf floating in it, cut to the shape of cherry petals. The label was Kamotsuru Tokusei Gold. For a brewery best known inside Japan as a steady, large-scale Saijo house, having its flagship bottle handed to a visiting U.S. president on television was an odd kind of fame — the sort that comes after a century of doing the unglamorous work first.

The unglamorous work started in 1873, in Saijo, a town on the plain east of Hiroshima city where the groundwater is unusually soft. Kimura Wahei put the name 賀茂鶴 on his sake that September, on the day of the Chrysanthemum Festival. 賀茂 ties the sake to the Kamo district and to the act of brewing itself; 鶴, the crane, was meant to read as nobility, a bid for the top rank. The company as it exists now was incorporated later, in 1918, when Kimura's house joined with six other Saijo brewing families to pool their kura into a single firm.

Saijo's soft water is the whole reason the place matters. Soft water is slow water for a brewer. It runs low in the minerals that drive a vigorous fermentation, so it tends to yield rounder, gentler sake rather than the dry, brisk style that hard-water regions like Nada built their name on. For a long time that was treated as a handicap. The fix is usually credited to Miura Senzaburo (1847–1908), a brewer from Akitsu down the coast, who worked out a soft-water brewing method late in the nineteenth century that turned the region's water from a liability into a signature. Kamotsuru brews squarely in that lineage, and the sakenowa flavor profile shows it: 賀茂鶴 reads mellow and full rather than sharp, mild and rich on the axes, low on the dry end.

The brewery also chased the machinery early. Around the turn of the century it adopted powered rice-milling, and the house claims to have been the first to install a power-driven rice-polishing machine. That is the kind of "first" that's hard to fully nail down, but it fits a kura that kept reaching for higher polish before higher polish was fashionable. The instinct paid off in 1958, when Kamotsuru put out 特製ゴールド賀茂鶴, the gold-leaf daiginjo, at a time when "daiginjo" was barely a commercial category yet. It became one of the early standard-bearers for premium, highly polished sake, and it is still in the lineup: the same bottle, gold flakes and all, that ended up in front of Obama half a century later.

Today Kamotsuru runs several brewing halls in parallel under separate toji, each releasing its own work, which is unusual for a house this size and keeps the range broader than a single master's hand would allow. The everyday face of the brewery is still plain 賀茂鶴; the ceremonial one is the gold daiginjo. Both come out of the same soft Saijo water that once looked like a problem.

Key facts

• Founded 1873 (Meiji 6) in Saijo, present-day Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture; the name 賀茂鶴 was given on September 9, 1873, by Kimura Wahei (四代目木村和平), who had studied brewing in Nada
• Reorganized as a joint-stock company, Kamotsuru Sake Brewing Co., Ltd., in 1918 (Taisho 7), founded with six local Saijo brewing families as co-investors
• Brews in the soft-water (軟水) tradition of the Saijo plain, the method generally credited to Miura Senzaburo (1847–1908) of Akitsu; the house style is mellow and full-bodied rather than dry, consistent with its sakenowa profile (mild/rich, low on the dry axis)
• Adopted powered rice-polishing around the turn of the 20th century; the brewery describes this as Japan's first power-driven rice-milling machine (a self-reported "first," noted here as such rather than as settled record)
• 特製ゴールド賀茂鶴 (Tokusei Gold), a daiginjo with cherry-petal-shaped pure-gold leaf, was first released in 1958; it was an early entry in what later became the premium daiginjo category, and is still in production
• In April 2014, Kamotsuru Tokusei Gold daiginjo was served at the Obama–Abe dinner at Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo, drawing international attention
• Operates multiple brewing halls under separate toji, broadening its range; flagship label 賀茂鶴 (Kamotsuru)
• Note: the current company president is not named here, and the "Japan's first powered milling machine" claim originates with the brewery, so neither is treated as independently settled