Uehara Furosen Nakagumi

Uehara Shuzo was founded in 1862 and is located in Takashima on the North-western side of Lake Biwa. The current 7th brewery owner is Isao Uehara.

The 7th generation family brewers have gone back to producing more of their sake each year without any additional cultivated yeasts and they use traditional brewing methods where possible. They have also revived the tradition of using wooden casks for fermenting most of their sake as they believe it provides better insulation for cold and heat rather than metal which reacts more rapidly to ambient temperature changes. The brewery also utilising the pressing technique ‘Tenbin Shibori’ (Wooden beam pressing) for all of the sake they produce. This wooden press takes 3 days to gently press the sake rather than the 12-18 hours it would take if they used a modern Yubata mechanical press. With such attention to detail these are truly some of the finest sake being made in Japan today.