Environment

Where we are is who we are

Some reflections on Suwa by Masumi president Naotaka Miyasaka

Masumi sake is at heart a product of our place and the people who live here. That place is known as Shinshu Suwa, a highland basin surrounded by the Yatsugatake “Eight Peaks” Range, Mount Tateshina, and the Kirigamine Highlands. Our sake benefits directly from the region’s clean air, pure water, and long cold winters. Beyond what’s good for the sake, we take great pride in all else Suwa has to offer: cool, dry summers, natural hot springs, the basin’s crown jewel Lake Suwa, and the unique festivals, shrines, and ruins that date from the dawn of Japan’s history.



Our beautiful yet fierce environment seems to have etched concern for detail and insistence on quality into our very DNA. In the past the people of Suwa built a thriving silk industry, and the region has since developed into a major center for high tech and precision manufacturing. Suwa is also famous for its agricultural produce and traditional food industries such as miso, kanten, and above all sake!


Sleepy backwater, home sweet home

Stepping off the express train onto Suwa station platform after the two-hour ride from Tokyo, my first breath of cool night air carries away the fatigue from a long day in the city. Though Suwa is often maligned as a “sleepy backwater,” I can’t thank my ancestors enough for deciding to settle here.
Cold winters

Suwa’s cold winters are legendary. A mopped floor would freeze before it dried, and during the war they used to practice tank maneuvers out on the frozen face of Lake Suwa. There were even times when our sake would freeze in the warehouse. Recently it seems that global warming has made our winters a shade less fierce.
Hot springs

The gods have made up for our cold winters by endowing the region with an abundance of natural “onsen” hot springs. Many of the older houses in Suwa get the hot water for the kitchen and bath directly from the hot springs. There is a hot spring foot bath on the platform of the train station, and even the Marumitsu department store across the street has a traditional onsen bath for the weary shopper. My elementary school had an onsen, too, so getting naked with classmates and teachers was a regular part of school life.


Gods and men

In both Shinto myth and the world of real men, Suwa has served as a retreat and as a place of exile. According to a story in the ancient “Kojiki” book of Shinto teachings, the god residing at the Suwa Taisha shrine vowed never to leave the Suwa basin after having lost an argument with his father over who should take possession of Japan. In the real world, historical figures such as Tadateru Matsudaira, sixth son of the first Tokugawa Shogun, and Yoshichika Uesugi, Kozukenosuke Kira’s adopted son, spent years of comfortable exile in Suwa.


“Onbashira” great pillars festival

This festival, the largest and most famous in Suwa, takes place once every six years in the years of the Tiger and the Monkey, and represents the symbolic renewal of the area’s Shinto shrines. Massive trees are pulled by hand from the surrounding forests, ridden down treacherous slopes, dragged across rivers and through the streets of Suwa’s villages and towns, and finally erected in the four corners of the major shrines. The event draws visitors from all over Japan and is a riotous festival that I’d always shied away from. But last time when I took hold of the rope to help pull our shrine’s pillar, I felt an unexpected rush of pride and enthusiasm that changed my mind about this ancient tradition.

Invention

They say necessity is the mother of invention. That seems to hold true for Suwa, since the fact that we are high in the mountains, away from wide plains and rich seas, seems to have made the people here unusually inventive and vigorous. I think of my elderly neighbor, whose precision parts business is so innovative that orders come in from all over the world. I think of the farmers who have made this area one of Japan’s top producers of everything from apples & apricots to tomatoes & celery.


Longevity

According to official surveys, people live longer in Nagano Prefecture than anywhere else in Japan. Several reasons have been postulated for this—the thin mountain air strengthens the heart and lungs, the rural lifestyle means people stay active longer, and so on. All certainly true, but I think another reason is that miso soup and a good cup of Masumi sake have always been an indispensible part of daily life in these mountains!

People

Scientists and farmers



When it comes to the people who are actually in there making our sake, the ideal combination is to have staff trained in biology and fermentation science working alongside farmers who really know how to grow things.

Before the start of the 2005 brewing season, I asked our longtime master brewers Masanori Amemiya and Tetsuo Moriyama to step into a supporting role beside two young assistant master brewers trained in biological science, Kenji Nasu and Kazuyuki Hirabayashi. Some thought it was too early to pass the reins to Nasu and Hirabayshi, but I really felt it was important to have two generations of master brewers working together to improve quality with an eye to the future.
Happily, Masters Amemiya and Moriyama handled the transition well and soon Master brewers Nasu and Hirabayshi were working in smooth combination with the seasonal brewing staff—most of whom are professional farmers during the summer and who command respect for their intimate knowledge of the living world.
My grandfather and father were blessed to have fine master brewers working under them. This was not just luck, however. I’m sure that my forebears’ legendary enthusiasm for quality “infected” the master brewers, too. Likewise, whether Masters Nasu and Hirabayashi become famous in the brewing world will depend on how well I manage to infect them with my own mania for great sake.

Rice

Sake is the joint creation of sake makers and rice farmers

“There’s no magic that’ll turn inferior rice into superior sake.” This simple truth is behind one of our long-standing iron-clad rules: Buy only newly harvested rice of highest quality from trusted growers.
From 2005 we’ve gone a step further by switching to specially bred sake rice for ALL our products, no matter the grade or price range. So now our iron-clad rule stands: Buy only newly harvested sake rice of highest quality from trusted growers. Sure, the costs are higher, but the improved quality is worth it.

We use three varieties of sake rice: “Miyama Nishiki” and “Hitogokochi” from Nagano Prefecture, and the “King” of daiginjo sake rice, “Yamada Nishiki,” from Hyogo Prefecture in western Japan. Our local Miyama Nishiki and Hitogokochi come from Kami Ina and Kita Azumino, and our Yamada Nishiki comes from the Kato Yamakuni area of Hyogo Prefecture.
Because we believe that sake is the joint creation of sake makers and rice farmers, we make a point of joining our rice farmers in the fields to plant and to harvest the rice that will become our sake. Likewise, the farmers come to see us making the sake, and naturally when it is ready we share many cups together!



The rice we buy is all unmilled brown rice, which we then mill by ourselves at our Fujimi kura. We are the only sake maker in Nagano Prefecture that mills its own rice. It is expensive to operate and maintain our 8 milling machines, but milling is a key step in sake brewing, and doing it ourselves gives us total control over quality.
The purpose of milling is to remove the outer layers of the rice grain, which contain proteins and other organic compounds that could produce off flavors. On average we mill the rice until less than 60% of the original mass remains. In other words, of the total 1200 tons of rice we buy each season, 480 tons is milled away into flour and never gets used to make sake!

Technique

Hand-made by highly skilled staff

It’s surprising how many of our customers mistakenly think that Masumi is a large producer with highly automated sake factories all over Japan. In fact, we are just a Nagano regional brewer with a moderate annual production of about 12,000 “koku” (1 koku = 180 liters, so annual production = 2,160,000 liters). We make all of our sake ourselves in Our two breweries, the original brewery in Suwa and a newer facility 20kms away in Fujimi.

Our way of making sake is still quite simple and relies on the skill and hard work of our staff much more than on machines. In fact, when we completed our newer Fujimi brewery in 1980, it did have the latest equipment and a tad more automation, but we found this just complicated things for the brewery staff, so we’ve since returned to our original simple ways.

This is not to say that we don’t use any machines. We use them in processes where we want to avoid bacterial contamination, such as milling, washing, soaking, and steaming. Conversely, we use fewer machines and more hand-crafting when working with the koji mold that converts starch to sugar, and with the yeast during fermentation.



The expression “splitting hairs” is often used in a negative sense, but I honestly think when it comes to making sake you have to “split hairs” if you want the highest quality. That is, you can’t leave even the smallest mistake uncorrected because each small step of the process builds on the step before it, so what started out as a small mistake can affect the result in a big way.

Even in the summer, when we’re not making sake, the master brewers and brewery staff stay hard at work analyzing the previous season’s results, looking for opportunities to improve.

Masumi　https://www.masumi.co.jp/