Imada Shuzo· 今田酒造本店

Akitsu, Hiroshima Prefecture · Est. 1868

Miho Imada did not plan to become a brewer. She left her family's brewery in the fishing village of Akitsu, studied in Tokyo, spent a decade working in the arts — and then, in her early thirties, came home. Her only brother had become a doctor; there was no one else. What began as necessity became a calling, and Miho became one of Japan's first female kuramoto-toji: brewery owner and head brewer in one. She has since been named to the BBC's 100 Women list, appeared as one of the stars of the Kanpai! Women in Sake documentary, and been selected for the Forbes 50 Over 50 Asia. None of that is what defines her. What defines her is the sake.

Imada's most celebrated act of recovery is Hattanso — a Hiroshima sake rice variety that had vanished from cultivation for over a century. The grain is tall, prone to toppling, low-yielding, and difficult to brew with. No commercial farmer had grown it in living memory. Imada persuaded contracted farmers in the region to bring it back, working through the challenges season by season until the harvest was stable. The resulting sake has a hard, mineral character distinct from anything made with modern cultivars — a flavor that could only come from this rice, in this place, tended by these people.

That instinct for place runs through everything she does. Imada works with Satake — a rice-milling company born in Hiroshima that invented Japan's first electric polishing machine — to explore new ways of shaping the grain before it enters the brewery. Their collaboration produced the Satake Series, built around two experimental milling techniques: henpei (flat polishing), which removes the same amount of protein at 60% as standard spherical milling achieves at 40%, and genkei (original form), which polishes the grain while preserving its natural contours. Each method produces a fundamentally different sake from the same rice. Alongside this, Imada works closely with research institutes to study yeast behavior and understand the microclimate of her brewery — believing that a sake's flavor is not invented but discovered, and that the job of a brewer is to listen carefully enough to find it.

"There's no point in a technique," she has said, "if it isn't evolving with the times."