With its ubiquitous gray roof tiles and slatted wooden walls, Yosuke Tanaka’s small sake brewery facing the Fukushimagata lagoon in Niigata Prefecture appears no different from the dozens of sake breweries scattered across the region.
The only visual clue that this isn’t your usual sake producer is the tank perched near its entrance: It bears a bright topographic illustration of the marshes of its waterfront — a design too modern for any traditional brewery — and an English name, Lagoon Brewery, a departure from the naming convention of using the founder’s surname.
Tanaka, 45, makes what he calls “craft sake.” He adds fruits and plants during the moromi (fermentation mash) stage of the brewing process to make beverages with various fruity or herbaceous flavors, such as tomato, strawberry, grapes, pear, kuromoji (a fragrant plant native to Japan) and pine needles.
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