Wine, Beer, Sake, Whiskey Blog at MoIppai » Japan

Sake Day and Nishinomiya Ebisu Sake Festival

MoIppai — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:56:48 +0000

They say that if you want to have a successful blog, the key thing is timing and to write posts timely and when the subject you’re writing about is current and relevant.

So here is my blog post about Sake Day in Japan which occurred 2 months ago on October 1st!

Sake day is so called as it’s around this time that the new brewing years sake is released.

To celebrate this momentous event Ebisu Temple in Nishinomiya held a sake festival that weekend with the local breweries showing off some of their new sakes for punters to taste and buy.

Getting off the train at the station we were immediately greeting with this display of Sake Barrels.

Sake Barrels

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Read the rest of Sake Day and Nishinomiya Ebisu Sake Festival (367 words)

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Post tags: Ebisu, Matsuri, Sake, Sake Festival, Yebisu

Sennenichi Sake Brewery, Awaji Island, Japan

MoIppai — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:00:24 +0000

On a recent trip to Awajishima (Awaji island, a tiny island inbetween Honshu and Shikoku, just off the coast of Kobe), we stopped in at the local sake brewery Sennenichi to pick up a bottle of the local brew to take home.

Sennenichi Sake Brewery

We were greeted very warmly and were very quickly invited for a mini-tour of the brewery by the extremely friendly owner.
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Read the rest of Sennenichi Sake Brewery, Awaji Island, Japan (398 words)

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Post tags: Japan, Japanese Breweries, Nihonshu, Sake, Sake Brewery

1 Million Yen “The Yamazaki” Whisky Sells Out in 24 Hours!

MoIppai — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:40:53 +0000

The Yamazaki

A few days ago Suntory started accepting orders for a very special limited edition bottling of their “Yamazaki Single Malt Whisky“.

This whisky has been aged more than 50 years and is selling for the very reasonable (if you’re idea of reasonable is ridiculously expensive) price of ¥1,000,000 (about US$13,000)!

The whisky is appropriately called “Yamazaki Single Malt 50-Year-Old Whisky” and is limited to 150 bottles.

Unfortunately, in case you did have ¥1 million spare, they sold out in 24 hours.

Oh well, maybe next time.

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Godzilla Sake Est Arivee!

MoIppai — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:11:01 +0000

After only a couple of days my “‘Hakai-O’ Sake Godzilla“, I blogged about recently, arrived in the post! No.43 of 3000. Nice.

Nice Packaging

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Read the rest of Godzilla Sake Est Arivee! (82 words)

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Post tags: Godzilla, Nihonshu, Sake, Shochu

Godzilla Sake

MoIppai — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:22:18 +0000

As well as having more than a passing interest in booze, I’m also quite keen on the Godzilla and other Toho Monster movies, and it’s not often these two worlds come together.

So I was very excited to read about Konishi Brewing Company releasing a Special Edition Shirayuki barley Shochu in a Godzilla pottery bottle!

Godzilla Bottle

Apparently the brewery were approached by Toho Co Ltd (makers of the Godzilla movies) to think of ways of celebrating 55 years since Godzilla’s birth (the first screening of the original Godzilla movie was in November 1954).

Konishi decided to release their special shochu in a pottery bottle based on the Godzilla from the 1989 movie “Godzilla vs Biollante“. (The Godzilla monster design changes every few films).

Unfortunately, although they’re calling it SAKE Godzilla (SAKE ゴジラ), it’s actually shochu not sake.
I prefer sake – shochu gives me killer hangovers – but in Japanese “sake” is actually “alcohol“, not what English speakers call sake (the rice wine). In Japanese that is “Nihonshu” (although people do say sake in Japanese for nihonshu sometimes so it can get a bit confusing at times).

Godzilla Sake

The bottle was designed by the artist Nariaki Ito and Koichi Kawakita who directed six of the recent Godzilla movies, and was made by a famous Japanese pottery maker Kanekoh Ceramic Corporation.

Kudos for Konishi Brewing for having a go at releasing an English press release for this too, although I have a feeling the translation was done by babelfish or Google translate, as it contains some great phrases like

Delight to get drunk and become enthusiastic on Godzilla this evening

Godzilla-shaped pottery bottle also produce to respect a sense of such mind after drinking.

Although I’m glad they tried, as I wouldn’t have been able to find out any of the facts I’ve just written about!

The shochu is a 100% barley shochu made with water from Rokko Mountain apparently, and although I don’t really like shochu, I couldn’t miss out on an item like this, so one of the 3000 limited editions is winging it’s way to me as we speak!
A bit pricey at ¥10,500 ($100), but hey, it’s a Godzilla bottle!

More information can be found on their website here. (Although it’s all in Japanese except the afore mentioned English press release).