They wondered why Los Angeles, despite its large Japanese population, had no sake brewery to call its own, and decided to remedy that, hatching the birth of Nova.
Both she and Jin like to taste sake and explore, so they traveled as far as Hokkaido to visit breweries and take notes on sake production and sales. A native of Niigata Prefecture, Tanabe owns a vitamin company in Niigata and in the U.S., distributes a soy paper product used as a stand-in for nori. It was while he was studying for his sake sommelier certification at Los Angeles’s Sake School of America in 2018 that Jin got to know his future partner, both business and IRL, Emiko Tanabe (they now have a one-and-a half-year-old daughter, Yuna). On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I dropped in on one of two new breweries that have opened recently in the area, Nova Brewing Company. Southern California, too, has witnessed some promising sake activity. On the whole, though, I see more openings than closures-and that's a good thing!” Yet over the last year, he’s noticed “a growing number of folks in the southern states who have either opened or expressed an interest in opening commercial sake breweries, including in states like Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas.” He adds, “I'm not really sure why that is-it could be due to access to rice-but it is in marked contrast to other regions where growth has been more incremental.
In North America, it’s hard to get an exact bead on that growth because the industry “is still in its infancy” and new breweries are in various stages of planning and building, notes Weston Konishi, president of the Sake Brewers Association of North America. The sake world is so exciting now in part because of the way it seems to be infiltrating every corner of the world, from New Orleans to New Zealand.