Koikawa: The Yamagata Brewery That Brought Kame no O Back

We have added Koikawa Dry Tokubetsu Junmai to the bottle list, $65 for a 720ml. It is one of the driest things on our sake page, and the brewery behind it has one of the better stories in Japanese sake.

Three Ears of Rice

In 1893 a farmer in Shonai named Abe Kameji was twenty six years old and looking at a bad year. Cold damage had wrecked the rice across the region, which in that part of Japan meant genuine hardship rather than a poor harvest.

On a visit to a shrine in Tachiyazawa he noticed one plant that had come through it. Three ears on it had ripened properly while everything around them had failed.

He asked for those three ears and took them home. Then he spent four years breeding from them, and in 1897 he had a new variety. He called it Kame no O.

Why You Have Eaten It Without Knowing

Kame no O was good. Long supple stems that stood up to wind, resistant to pests, a short run from heading to ripening, and it did not demand much fertiliser to give a reliable crop.

Then modern agriculture happened. Improved varieties arrived that yielded more and were easier to farm at scale, and Kame no O could not compete on those terms. It went out of cultivation almost entirely and became one of those things older farmers mentioned and nobody grew.

Here is the part I like. It did not actually disappear. Kame no O was crossed into Rikuu 132, and from there its line runs into Sasanishiki and Koshihikari, which is to say into most of the rice Japan has eaten since. The variety that lost is the ancestor of the ones that won, and the flavour people praise in Koshihikari is in large part inherited from it.

Getting It Back

Koikawa Shuzo has been brewing in Shonai since 1725, in the same region Abe Kameji farmed. They are marking three hundred years this year.

They started test-growing Kame no O again from seed rice in 1981, and their owner, Kazuyoshi Sato, led the wider movement to bring the variety back. Reviving a rice is not a matter of planting it and waiting. You start from a tiny quantity of seed, build up enough grain to be worth milling, and learn to farm something no living person has farmed commercially. It took four years before they could fill a single tank with Kame no O alone.

There is a pleasing symmetry in that. Four years for Abe Kameji to make the rice, four years for Koikawa to get it back.

The Sommelier Part

Sato was a wine sommelier before he was a brewery owner, and he is open about brewing toward what he learned there. That is not a marketing line, it is visible in the sake.

Wine people think in acidity. It is the axis a wine is judged on, and it is the thing that decides whether a bottle works at a table. Sake is not usually discussed that way, and low acidity is often treated as a mark of refinement. Koikawa goes the other direction, and everything they make is built to sit next to food rather than to be admired on its own.

They also ferment only with Yamagata yeast, and brew nothing but junmai. No added alcohol anywhere in the range, which is a real commitment at this size, because added alcohol is cheaper and easier to keep consistent.

What the Numbers Mean

Two things on this label are worth being able to read.

Tokubetsu junmai means special junmai, and it is a defined grade rather than a compliment. To use it a brewery must either mill the rice to 60% or less, or use some other declared special method. This is milled to 55%, comfortably inside.

Plus twelve is the sake meter value, the nihonshudo. It measures density against water: sugar makes sake denser and pushes the number negative, so a positive number means the yeast has eaten most of the sugar. Around +3 to +5 is what usually gets called dry. Plus twelve is a different category, and in Japan it earns the word chokarakuchi, ultra-dry.

The interesting part is that it does not drink like a number that severe. There is real acidity behind it, orange and green apple, and enough body that it does not read as thin. Making a sake that dry without hollowing it out is the difficult version of the trick.

How to Drink It

Cool, or at room temperature. It also takes a gentle warming, which most of our list does not, and warming it brings the rice forward.

Treat it as a food sake, because that is plainly what it is for. Give it grilled things, fried things, anything salty or fatty, and it does what a dry junmai should: cut through, reset your mouth, and get out of the way. It handles vinegared dishes and even cheese better than most sake will.

$65 for the 720ml. If you want to understand what the dryness is doing, order it alongside something polished and floral from the same page. The gap between what those two bottles are for is the whole argument.