A Taisho-era brewery in the snow country of Uonuma.

Hakkaisan is the sake of Hakkaisan Brewery Co., Ltd., which the company says was established in 1922. Niigata Prefecture’s guide to Minamiuonuma, updated in February 2025, says the brewery was founded in the eleventh year of the Taisho era in Nagamori, now part of Minamiuonuma City, in the Uonuma district of southern Niigata, marked its centenary in 2022, and is now run by the third generation of the family.

The family is the Nagumo family. The prefecture’s guide names the first president as Koichi and the second as Kazuo, and explains that the company’s two breweries, Kowa-gura and Dai-ni Kowa-gura, take their name from one character of each man’s given name. Japanese press profiles give the founder’s full name as Koichi Nagumo.

Leadership has passed within the family more recently too. Company announcements from December 2021 and March 2025 name Jiro Nagumo as president of the brewery. The company profile on its English-language site, as read in October 2026, names Masato Nagumo as president and chief executive of the brewery and Jiro Nagumo as president of Hakkaisan Co., Ltd., the sister company set up in 1986 to wholesale its sake.

Both the company and its main brand take their name from Mount Hakkai, a peak above the brewery that, the prefecture notes, has long been an object of mountain worship. The company says the brewery’s water is spring water from the foot of the mountain, the Raiden-sama no Shimizu, piped to the brewery and used for all of its brands; the prefecture says the spring was named one of Niigata’s notable waters around 1985.

Clear water, soft rice and a store full of snow.

The company describes the sake it aims for as having “full body but clear and smooth,” a sake that does not get in the way of food. It says it uses Gohyakumangoku and Yamada Nishiki rice and limits each tank to about three tons. The cold winters and very soft water of Uonuma, the company says, shape the clean, simple taste for which Niigata sake is known. Its range runs from everyday seishu and tokubetsu honjozo to junmai ginjo and junmai daiginjo, alongside sparkling sake and kijoshu.

The best-known feature of the site is the snow. In 2013 the company built the Hakkaisan Yukimuro, a snow-storage building at its Uonuma no Sato visitor complex. The Japanese government’s magazine Highlighting Japan reported in January 2022 that it can hold up to 1,000 tonnes of snow, that the snow alone keeps the storage rooms at about 3 to 4 degrees Celsius, that cold air from it is also sent to the shops’ refrigerators to replace part of their electricity, and that the idea was prompted by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011. The company sells a junmai daiginjo aged for three years in that store.

Uonuma no Sato itself turns the brewery into a small village of shops, restaurants and the second Kowa brewery at the foot of the mountain. The prefecture’s guide describes a museum there, the Hachikura, with a library of books on food and sake from around the world, next to the brewery.

The company has spread well beyond sake. Its English site lists Yoroshiku Senman shochu, a plum sake, RYDEEN beer and an amazake made only from koji, and its Japanese site adds Senen Koujiya, a koji and fermented-foods shop.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all sake, shochu and soju names: Dassai, Hakkaisan, Kubota, Ozeki, Sho Chiku Bai, iichiko and Chum Churum. Sake, shochu and soju brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family breweries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A sake, shochu or soju brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drink is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its sake, shochu or soju is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Uonuma to Brooklyn, Niseko and Dodger Stadium.

Abroad, the company works through Hakkaisan Brewery USA. In December 2021 it announced a long-term business and capital partnership between that company and Gotham Sake LLC, the maker of Brooklyn Kura sake in New York, covering brewing education, sales channels for both brands and the joint development of sake, craft beer, spirits and fermented foods.

In Hokkaido, Hakkaisan opened the Niseko Distillery at the foot of the Annupuri ski area in October 2021, the sake-trade site Nomunication reported, with whisky distilling under way from March that year and ohoro gin, its name taken from an Ainu word meaning “to continue,” as the first release. Powderlife, citing the Hokkaido Shimbun, reported in May 2023 that Jiro Nagumo had told local business owners he was experimenting with sake made from Niseko-grown rice.

The newest stage is sport. On 13 March 2025 the company announced a partnership with the Los Angeles Dodgers; its release said Hakkaisan sake would be sold in original cups at Dodger Stadium and advertised on the scoreboard and stadium displays, and quoted the club’s chief marketing officer, Lon Rosen.

The name needs a little care online. “Hakkaisan” is also the Japanese name of the mountain itself; the company’s global site is hakkaisan.com and its Japanese site hakkaisan.co.jp.

For a design guide, Hakkaisan shows how a brewery can borrow a mountain’s name and build a whole visitor landscape — water, snow and a village of shops — around it. Compare Kubota, another Niigata sake, and Gekkeikan of Fushimi; for the lettering question on its own, see What Font Does Hakkaisan Use?. For this guide we use mountain slate, snow white and a seal red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hakkaisan’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.