Aim to Make Sake Beloved by the LA People - Sawtelle Sake, Los Angeles

When hearing the name Sawtelle Sake, you may think of a West Los Angeles boulevard lined with Japanese restaurants. However, since its founding in 2019, the brewery has been brewing at a distillery in Ventura, nearly 100 kilometers away.

Now, Sawtelle Sake has finally decided to open a facility in DTLA. If everything goes well, the project is expected to be completed in the summer of 2024.

With a keen sense for trends in Japan, the home of sake, Sawtelle Sake aspires to create local sake in Los Angeles. Here is an interview with the duo, who are enthusiastic about the upcoming brewery, about their past activities and plans for the future.

The birth of Sawtelle Sake

Sawtelle Sake is named after Sawtelle Boulevard, also known as Little Osaka where one of the founder’s Troy Nakamatsu resides. Like many sake breweries in the US, Sawtelle Sake began as a home-brewing project.

As of April 2024, Sawtelle has only a koji room, an office, and a bar space still under construction. Since its founding five years ago, most of the brewing has been done at Ventura Spirits: a distillery located 100 kilometers north of Los Angeles in the city of Ventura.

"It was difficult to get a brewing license in Los Angeles, so we rented space at Ventura Spirits. But koji making is sensitive and requires working late into the night, so I built a koji room near my house," said Nakamatsu.

Los Angeles was the place where California wine began and once supplied wine to the entire United States, but after Prohibition, its production shifted to Northern California, mainly Napa. In order to brew sake in California, a wine grower license (Type 2) is required, but in Los Angeles, the application process is becoming more and more difficult.

"Basically all the work has been done, except they just won't give us the license. They won't pass our inspections because every single person that showed up - of which there were like seven - had a different definition of what the rules are," frowned co-founder Maxwell Leer.

Meet buddies who share a love of sake

In 2019, Nakamatsu resigned from his previous position at Morgan Stanley, and originally founded Sawtelle Sake with another partner. However, Sawtelle Sake shifted operational gears due to the daunting road to success for a startup of a still minor alcoholic beverage company in the United States. It was then that a chance acquaintance brought him to Leer, the current co-founder of the company.

Long involved in the wine industry, Leer moved to the Mutual Trading Company's New York office in 2018 to handle sake marketing.

“[At that time,] we really needed to hire someone to help us with everything. It was just very strange. But, once we started talking, here we were seeing sort of what we needed to do, to make sake something that's more mainstream,” recalled Nakamatsu.

Leer continued, “it's all serendipitous in timing.”

“When I worked at Mutual, I noticed that all of these Japanese brands were only living in Japanese environments across this country. If Troy and I had met at 30, this would never have been possible. But also the market would never have been ready ten years ago for what we're doing right now. So much of that timing is relevant to us meeting whether randomly or not and having sort of a shared passion and sort of life goal to actually popularize something that's terribly misunderstood.”

Currently, Shinichi Fukui, a former Japanese engineer, has joined the team and the three are working together to promote the business by sharing ideas.

Products adapted to the market and the times

Three stages achieved

Sawtelle Sake has completed three product lines in the five years since its inception.

The first is the flagship product, Clear Skies, which comes in a small can. It is a junmai ginjo nama genshu brewed from California-grown Yamadanishiki rice polished to 60%. The easy-to-handle size and cute iconic Daruma doll (*1) motif make it a gateway to many beginners.

(*1) Daruma doll: a traditional Japanese doll symbolizing perseverance and luck.

The second product launched in an effort to create a flavor more tailored to the American market was a product named "The Pink Can".

As Leer said, “(Most American alcohol products being canned are) doing what's called the race towards the bottom, where you basically maximize your profits at scale with low input ingredients. For the Pink Can, we use the most expensive citrus juice on the planet,” this product is based on Clear Skies sake, combined with plenty of hand-pressed yuzu juice from Yuzuya Honten, Yamaguchi, Japan, and flavored with brown sugar from Okinawa, hibiscus, and ginger.

And in the fall of 2023, they have released four products in 750ml. bottles. The flagship "Clear Skies," an aged nama "Wild Horizon," a red shiso-infused "Northern Lights," and a yuzu sake "Super Nova.” None of the labels use the terminology like "Junmai" or “Yamadanishiki."

“In the transition of the labeling, we're barely even going to use the word sake. Because what does that word signify to the end user if it means nothing of value,” explained Leer.

Exploring new brewing style

All of the previous products were made from Yamadanishiki, the most popular sake rice. Many sake makers in the U.S. use Calrose, an improved rice variety with Japanese roots, so it is highly irregular for a brewery to use only Yamadanishiki to make its sake in the states.

“Yamadanishiki is suitable for sake brewing, while Calrose is a bit more time-consuming. However, recently they have been using the latter to make koji for cooking, with future raw material rice under consideration,” explained Nakamatsu.

In addition, they have recently begun to brew sake without adding lactic acid by using white koji.

“It wasn't specifically to eliminate lactic acid. We just wanted to experiment with it and see what it was like. We made some amazake then we said, oh, this is really good” explained Nakamatsu. However, the use of white koji instead of adding lactic acid has been attracting attention in Japan in recent years, indicating that they might apply this method to sake brewing.

As for packaging, they will continue to produce both cans and bottles.

“The cans are super important for distribution because they travel really well. So we want to get on to the shelves of the grocery store or big box stores. And the bottles are really good for like our tasting room and for restaurants and stuff like that. So I think it's really important for us to have all of those formats anyway,” said Nakamatsu. Also,they could use different cans for different purposes: smaller for low-alcohol products, larger for higher-priced products or fruit-infused.

Become a brewery rooted in Los Angeles

New facility to open in DTLA in summer

Sawtelle Sake has been struggling to open a brewery in the city of Los Angeles while attending Ventura Spirits, and finally signed a contract for the ideal property earlier this year. It is a 5500 sq. ft. two-story building in a former lingerie store in the Fashion District in DTLA.

Currently, the building is in the middle of construction. Nakamatsu and Leer guided around the building, explaining how fermentation tanks would be placed and how koji could be thrown in the tanks from the room on the upper floor. They visited sake breweries in Japan last fall to study the structure and mechanism of each. With a second floor set up in a skip-floor style, the building looks as if it was prepared for sake brewing.

For this new brewhouse, they purchased the most used Yabuta-style presses from Japan. Because of the high cost of importing Japanese equipment, only a few American breweries have yet to install the presses.

“We're going to have from one tank to four tanks. And we're going to go from a rate of about one batch every six weeks at a maximum to like three batches a month. So these tanks are going to be 25% larger than the current one’s we use,” said Nakamatsu.

The building is insulated on all sides and has no windows. In Los Angeles, where temperatures can easily rise to high in the summer, minimizing air conditioning allows for more sustainable energy use/production.

Construction is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2024. It takes more than six months after the property is under contract due to the fact that opening a brewery requires a variety of permits and approvals. “The building right now is permitted as a warehouse, so we need to change that to a manufacturing facility. And then once that happens, we need to transfer our winery license from Ventura to DTLA. That can take a few months. And then, federally, we have to transition the same license from Ventura to DTLA., and then there's a number of electrical and plumbing permits that we need to get upgraded facilities for drainage and new machinery and stuff. So there's just a lot of that sort of stuff that we need to work on.”

Nakamatsu stated that the brewing is on hiatus until the new brewery is completed.

“I think we've taken all the lessons that we've learned over the past three years,” he proudly added. “At Ventura Spirits, those guys are all engineers, basically. They don't ever want to hire anyone. They can fix everything themselves, which was super challenging for me. And so now I'm confident that if we can just get the permit I will know exactly how I will lay out our brewery in here.”

Create a sake culture in the city

For brewing water, they use Reverse Osmosis filtered-water from the city of Los Angeles. While many Japanese breweries value soft water in sake, Nakamatsu points out that in fermentation techniques such as beer, the mineral content is important.

“This is why people probably laugh at me, but I think this is true, at least in our experience. But you can ferment it out of water and make it taste really chunky to me. You can make it taste like there's so much nutrients in the koji and rice,” described Nakamatsu.

Sawtelle Sake has decided to be “not pretentious” when it comes to water in order to stay rooted in the Los Angeles area. Similarly, they plan to source as much of the fruit and herbs they blend into their flavored products locally as possible.

“The exact percentage of Americans drinking sake is roughly less than 1%. Additionally, and this often gets overlooked, people want to talk about sake as an end in itself if it's delineated as kimoto, junmai or whatever pedigree shows you that maybe everyone wants to talk about how special it is,” added Leer. “And then there's the taboo culture of fruit sake being typically framed as of lower quality. But why not give the consumers some things they love, right? In addition to sugar, which Americans happen to love, most consumers love good sugar especially .”

“If it's just us and we want to have a viable company, we have to make money. And in order to do that, we have to speak to people outside the traditional sake industry. And those are American consumers; we have to listen to what they want,” continued Nakamatsu.

Once the brewery is completed, they will begin work in earnest on starting a tasting room on Sawtelle Boulevard.

“We're almost there. We have a pretty cool idea of what we want to do in terms of, something very limited, maybe two or three parties a night doing a tasting experience. Not something that's overly expensive or fancy in any way, but just really interesting pairings with our sakes there. We also want to institute a culture which doesn't exist here. We want the neighbors to know when our next batch is going to be released and what I want them to know seasonally. And we want to be able to sell big bottles for celebrations and really create that culture,” said Nakamatsu.

Five years after its founding, Sawtelle Sake is finally fulfilling its dream of opening a sake brewery in the city of Los Angeles, and will continue to take on the challenges of being an American brewer by following and respecting the latest brewing trends in Japan as a fan, while calmly assessing the challenges.

The new brewery is scheduled to open in the summer. How will the sake scene in Los Angeles move when they are given the big stage? Let's look forward to the next story after the sake brewery is completed.