Hata Brewery was founded in 1914, at the foot of Tarōbō-san in Higashiomi, Shiga. It makes two labels. Kiryōyoshi is the traditional house sake, brewed as the family has brewed it for generations. Daijiro carries the name of the fourth-generation owner and is where the present generation's own sensibility comes through — that is the label we bring in.

The phrase the brewery works by is "sake-making where you can see the faces of the people involved." Since the Daijiro brand was launched in 1999, every grain of rice has come from contracted local farmers, and since 2010 the brewery has been growing sake rice itself as a member of the growers' group Nonbyakushō no Kai. The rice is all Shiga — Ginfubuki, Yamada Nishiki, Shiga Wataribune No. 6 and Tamasakae — grown to the prefecture's environmentally-conscious produce standard, with chemical fertiliser cut to half or less.

The brewing is deliberately old-fashioned, working with what nature does rather than around it. The season runs five months, October to March. Koji takes fifty hours. The kimoto starter is ground by hand. The range also includes a bag-hung shizuku sake, the moromi suspended in bags and left to press itself under its own weight — something few breweries anywhere still do.

What comes out is dry and driven by acidity, with the round umami that kimoto gives. The brewery's own advice, and ours, is to drink it at room temperature or gently warmed, and to drink it with food.

One thing worth knowing about how they behave. When COVID collapsed demand and the sensible move was to cut the farmers' planted acreage, Hata and the neighbouring Yasui Shuzōjō — who share the same growers — took the rice anyway and laid the sake down to mature instead. That became AS TIME GOES BY. We first worked with Daijiro in supporting their exports, and asked to trade properly after meeting the man behind them.