Masuda Tokubee Shoten · 増田徳兵衞商店

Fushimi, Kyoto · Est. 1675

Fushimi is the heart of Kyoto's sake culture; a district fed by the same soft, mineral-rich groundwater that has attracted brewers for centuries, and home to some of the most storied names in Japanese sake. Masuda Tokubee Shoten has been part of that landscape since 1675, which makes them not just old, but ancient. They were brewing when the Edo period was barely a generation old.

One of the brewery's most charming traditions speaks to how seriously that continuity is taken: each time a new head of the family assumes leadership, they take on the name Masuda Tokubee; not as a title, but as an identity. The name has been passed down fifteen times. When the 14th generation handed over to his son in 2022, there was a new Masuda Tokubee standing where every Masuda Tokubee before him had stood. It is a way of saying that the person matters less than the lineage and that the lineage carries a responsibility.

Their brand, Tsuki no Katsura — Moon Laurel — takes its name from a poem composed by a Kyoto aristocrat who was a regular visitor to the brewery in the late Edo period. The moon, in Japanese folklore, is home to a rabbit and a katsura tree said to grant longevity. Look at their logo closely, then turn it upside down: a rabbit with long ears appears. Three hundred and fifty years of history, hiding a small joke.

The brewery's innovation credentials are formidable. In 1965, they became the first brewery in Japan to produce sparkling nigori sake; a lightly filtered, cloudy sake bottled while still actively fermenting, so that natural secondary fermentation produces bubbles in the bottle, like a champagne that has never been corrected or adjusted. The carbonation varies from batch to batch, because nothing is standardised. Early customers complained about the inconsistency; today it is understood as exactly the point. A decade later, they released a 10-year koshu. Aged sake at a time when the market was not interested. In the attic of the brewery, ceramic jars of Shigaraki ware hold sake that has been quietly ageing for over fifty years.

None of this is nostalgia. The brewery today works with locally grown Kyoto rice varieties (Iwai) and continues to develop new expressions including low-alcohol sake, staying connected to where the conversation in sake is going. Masuda Tokubee Shoten has simply been doing this long enough to know that staying relevant is itself a tradition.