Kochi

Sake in Kochi

Kochi Prefecture lies in the south of Shikoku, borders Ehime and Tokushima prefectures across the Shikoku Mountains to the north, and faces the Pacific Ocean to the south. The Kochi Sake Brewers Association is made up of 19 breweries in the prefecture (as of October 2026). For the sake made in the prefecture in the one year from July 2024 to June 2025, the average nihonshu-do (sake meter value: a figure showing the weight of sake compared with water, which becomes more positive the less sugar the sake contains) was +5.3, the second highest among Japan's prefectures.

Kochi has kept a culture of exchanging a great deal of crisp, dry sake at banquets. In the Tosa style of offering a cup, a junior person offers a cup to a senior person, who drinks it down and returns the cup, and then the person who received the cup back drinks. “土佐はし拳,” a game in which two people facing each other guess the total number of chopsticks they are hiding and the loser drains a cup of sake, is part of this culture, and a national championship is held in Kochi City every year around September to October.

For a long time, almost all of the rice suited to sake brewing (shuzo kotekimai) came from outside the prefecture. In 1988 the “Kochi Prefecture Sake Rice Study Group” was formed, and from it came “Gin no Yume” (1998; its mother is “Yamada Nishiki”), the prefecture's first homegrown sake rice; “Kazenaruko” (2002); and “Tosa Urara” (2018), developed from Kazenaruko to be less prone to cracking. The prefecture's Industrial Technology Center has developed dozens of “Kochi yeasts” (yeast is the microorganism that carries out fermentation). One of them, “CEL-24” (1993), is a yeast that produces sweet-and-sour, highly aromatic sake, and it is used by 13 breweries in the prefecture. Sake brewed with deep ocean water drawn up from a depth of 370 m off Cape Muroto has also been made into products by several breweries in the prefecture.

Brewery map

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• Suigei Shuzo 酔鯨酒造Suigei 酔鯨KochiRead the article