Why You’ll Be Hooked on This Boundary-Pushing Sake from the Fukushima Frontier

IN THE JAPANESE SAKE SCENE, some of the hardest bottles to get your hands on right now are from a tiny Fukushima craft brewer called haccoba. Their iconoclastic offerings, dry hopped like beers or infused with cacoa husks from chocolate production, for example, are outliers in the typically staid industry, yet every batch sells out in a matter of hours, snapped up by fans across the country. 

“We are trying to make sake that pushes the concept of what sake can be, sake that opens up new frontiers,” says 30-year-old founder Taisuke Sato. Motivated by a desire to support the revitalization of Fukushima, he left an IT job in Tokyo in 2019 to learn sake-making from scratch, eventually relocating his family to the little town of Odaka.  

Odaka fell within the exclusion zone established after the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, so for half a decade, the entire town sat empty save for the occasional PPC-wearing decontamination crew demolishing buildings and carting off topsoil. In 2016, that work finally finished and people were allowed back, but after so many years, many former residents had settled elsewhere. Only a fraction returned, many of them elderly. However, the cheaply available land and the flexibility and potential in building a town quite literally from scratch also attracted a handful of new settlers: entrepreneurs looking to try something daring. Sato was able to gather a team of likeminded young professionals and enough crowdfunded capital to renovate an old farmhouse into a brewery and pub, opening haccoba in February 2021. 

Their first brews were dry hopped, reviving a local fermentation technique that nearly died out in the late 1800s when the government banned homebrewing. Prior to that, many Japanese households made their own small-batch sakes called doburoku, and in the Tohoku region, hops were sometimes added as a natural preservative. These early experiments became haccoba’s flagship Hanauta series.  

Hanauta Drops, for example, is brewed with locally grown rice, a Japanese hops variety called Karahana-so, and a blend of yellow and white koji that brings out sweet and sour notes to balance the bitter aromatics of the hops. A touch of fermentation carries on after bottling, imparting a slight effervescence that makes the citrusy concoction even more refreshing. 

haccoba’s team is pursuing more out-of-the-box experimentation with their LAB_series, partnering not only with food producers mundane and surprising (sake from insect egg sacs?!) but also artists, fashion labels, and musicians. A recent release was a collaboration with a fragrance company to create an aromatic sake as powerfully nostalgic as Proust’s iconic cakes, fittingly named ‘Quelle est votre madeleine?’ and sold with a matching beeswax candle.  

You might say collaboration is in haccoba’s DNA. Odaka is still very short on businesses like bars or restaurants. From the beginning, Sato wanted the facility to include a brewpub to provide a much-needed venue for residents to socialize and forge a new sense of community. With sake providing that age-old social lubrication, haccoba is a place Odakans can enjoy themselves together, subtly recrafting a local identity in a place brutally cut off from its own past. 

“Odaka also exists as a kind of frontier now. Because the residents all had to leave, the life of the town ground to a halt. Livelihoods, culture, everything was gone and now it has to be recultivated,” Sato says. “As we try to develop new ways of making sake, I hope we are able to work together with people in Odaka to bring new life to the town too.” 

The Details:

If you visit Fukushima, haccoba’s onsite shop is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the brewpub hours are Friday through Sunday 5:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. with reservations. However, if you don’t make it farther north than Tokyo, try your luck at Hakko Department in Shimo-kitazawa, which reliably gets a few bottles of each new release.  

Images courtesy of All About, Inc.

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