Noujou: Akita Prefecture's Farmer-Led Sake Project

While browsing for sake on our last trip to Japan, I came across a bottle that immediately caught my eye. The label was beautiful, rustic and spring-like. It bore the handmade look of a woodblock print, and its characters were rendered in the vivid green color of young rice plants. A few sheafs of rice seemed to sprout out of the first character,  農 “nou,” which means  farming, or agriculture. The second character, 醸 “jou,” relates to brewing. Around the border were whimsical-looking grains of rice, some polished, some unpolished.

         The label read. “The farmer-made Japanese sake project.” I was intrigued. While my co-writer Michael (creator of “the periodic table of sake rice” and the “yeast galaxy” infographics 🤓) hunts down sake with obscure yeast combos and rice varieties for inclusion in his sake regionality course, I’m more interested in any bottle that highlights sake as the agricultural product it is. When I noticed that Noujou was from Akita Prefecture’s 332-year-old Fukurokuju Brewery I knew I had to buy a bottle. The brewery makes one of my favorite lines of sake, the shimmering, energetic Ippakusuisei, which is designed to highlight local rice, water and yeast.

        The bottle of Noujou I purchased was brewed with Akita Sake Komachi (the prefecture’s choice for making ginjo-quality sake) and polished to 50 percent. In the glass, it gives up a very daiginjo-like fruity aroma, but on the palate expresses plenty of umami and acidity, which helped it stand up to the Chinese cumin lamb dish I paired it with.

         A QR code on the bottle read, “Recruiting members!” and linked to a page that explains the concept of the project, which connects members with people involved in the making of the product, from farmer to brewer to seller.

         Sixteenth-generation brewery president Kouei Watanabe was happy to discuss this eight-year-old brand, and connected me with the man who spearheads the project and grew all its rice, Takuro Matsuhashi. A contract farmer for Fukurokuju, his fields are located only 12 miles from the brewery. The project has attracted about 250 members, he says, including individuals and restaurants. Group activities include planting, harvesting, and preparing rice for steaming. Gatherings are held at the restaurants of fellow members to taste and discuss the brew. “The fields where the rice is grown were highly fertile and productive to begin with,” explains Matsuhashi, “so only about half the amount of the standard chemical fertilizer for Akita is used.”

Members, he adds, get six types of Noujou annually: three different brewing styles (two types of unpasteurized and one hiyaoroshi, or once-pasteurized sake), each made with two different types of rice. Comparing the different expressions of both rice and brewing style would make for some pretty interesting discussions. In addition to Akita Sake Komachi, master brewer Hitoshi Ichinoseki (Fukurokuju’s own master brewer) brews three of the six bottles with the increasingly popular Kairyou Shinkou rice (a descendant of the Yamagata Prefecture heirloom Kame-no-O, for those of you who care to know).

        I’m all for this type of agri-centric sake membership program, which I’ve seen here and there in Japan. They can help bridge the urban-rural divide, create interest in supporting regional agriculture and elevate the stature of farmers, who are too often overlooked when we enjoy a glass of sake into which growers as well as brewers have poured their heart and soul.

Watanabe’s favorite food pairing with Noujou is a Spanish-style asparagus and oyster al ajillo dish (typically cooked with garlic and olive oil), especially, he says, when it’s made with the stellar asparagus that farmer Matsuhashi grows himself. What could be better than a pairing in which both the sake rice and the starring vegetable were cultivated on the same land, by the same farmer? Another thing to note: While asparagus is considered one of the most difficult foods with which to pair wine, sake’s lack of tannins and high level of amino acid-driven umami eliminate this problem.

 The sake I purchased in Akita City was the retail version of Noujou: pasteurized to withstand travel and time. Knowing more about this project makes me wish I could participate in its in-depth tasting events and sample some of the fresher, unpasteurized versions and those made with Kairyou Shinkou rice. But will we ever see any of the six varieties in North America? Since farmer Matsuhashi’s 60-bale harvest is converted into only about 2,400 bottles of sake rice per year, Watanabe says he has no plans to export. You can, however, find many of Fukurokuju’s other sake products outside of Japan, which will give you a sense of this venerable brewery’s different sake expressions.

For these particular bottles, you’ll just have to add Japan, and ideally Akita, to your post-Covid 19 travel wish-list and check out the Noujou project on its home turf, where it was designed to be consumed.  

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