Aizu Musume (Takahashi Shosaku Brewery)

The Free Bacchus Story

The Takahashi family has brewed at Ichinoseki, in the south of the Aizu basin, since early in the Meiji era, around 1868; fires took most of the records. The first Shosaku built the business on rice from his own land. His son saw wartime consolidation shut the brewery and post-war land reform take most of the fields. In the 1980s Wataru Takahashi’s father gave up ordinary table sake, cutting output by well over half. Wataru came home in 1995 and runs the brewery now.

Sake is brewed from rice, water, koji mould and yeast, and the brewery says the Aizu basin has good soil, plenty of groundwater, and over a hundred days a year below freezing and as many above 25°C. It calls its approach dosan dohō: local people, local rice and water, local methods. It makes only junmai, with no distilled alcohol added, and honjozo, which has a little. The food and sake journalist Sando Atsuko, on the brewery’s website, says Aizu Musume has no showy aroma and makes little impression on one sip; then something warm builds as you drink.

Its own paddies, about four hectares, all lie within three kilometres of the brewery. The earliest, still called the trial field, has had no pesticides or chemical fertiliser since 1986. Some fields are organic, others ‘special cultivation’, with those inputs cut to half of conventional farming or less. Since 2019 its Jō series has made one sake from each single paddy.

Fukushima Prefecture is itself a registered organic JAS certifier, and in 2007 it certified the brewery’s rice fields, the trial field among them, under certificate No. 19. The three paddies the brewery lists as organic add up to about 0.8 hectares, each with its own Jō bottle, and Muishin, a year-round junmai, is made from organic JAS-certified Aizu rice. With no organic certificate for the brewing, the rice is certified organic and the sake is not.