A farmers’ sake from the Kameda district.

Koshi no Kanbai (越乃寒梅) is the sake of Ishimoto Sake Brewery (石本酒造), in Kitayama, in the Kōnan ward of Niigata City. The company dates its founding to 1907, the 40th year of Meiji, when Ryuzo Ishimoto began brewing; the business was incorporated as a company on 16 November 1961. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same founding year.

The brewery sits in the Kameda district (Kameda-go), on low ground between the Agano and Shinano rivers. The company says the area has been known for plums since the Edo period, and that its brand takes its name from the plum blossom that holds out through the cold and opens with a quiet beauty. The brewery’s statement of its values returns to the image of a single plum flower opening in the lingering snow of early spring as a picture of its own idea of brewing.

According to the company, Ryuzo Ishimoto set out to make a sake that would restore the strength of farmers after their work, chose the Kamenoo rice variety from Kanji village, in what is now Shibata, and judged each batch by taste. The second head, Seigo Ishimoto, took over in 1933. The company says he drilled more than a hundred wells before finding soft water beneath the family garden, and used it with long, slow fermentation at low temperature even though soft water was then thought to make fermentation risky.

Japanese Wikipedia says the brewery held to a light, dry style during and after the war, rather than adopting the sanbai jozo method that stretched sake with added alcohol and sugar, and that its sales suffered while drinkers favoured richer, sweeter sake.

A magazine, a “phantom sake” and a boom.

That changed in the 1960s. Hisako Sasaki, the essayist who founded the magazine Sake (『酒』) in April 1955 and edited it until 1997, took up Koshi no Kanbai in the mid-1960s, and is credited as one of those who set off Japan’s jizake boom, the craze for regional sake, according to Japanese Wikipedia. Its entry on the brewery says Sasaki presented the sake as a “phantom sake” (maboroshi no sake), and that an article in Shukan Asahi in 1963 about her devotion to it helped start the boom. The company’s own history dates its feature in Sake to 1967.

The style it became known for is usually summed up as tanrei karakuchi, light and dry, a phrase Japanese Wikipedia uses for Koshi no Kanbai as a representative Niigata sake. The company describes the taste as light yet powerful and easy to drink.

The brewery did not grow to match the fame. The third head, Ryuichi Ishimoto, who took over in 1982, added tanks to store sake cold for six months to two years before release, tightened hygiene and quality control, and kept production limited during the boom, the company says. Japanese Wikipedia notes that it is still treated as a “phantom sake,” and quotes the brewery as saying it would rather the sake be drunk casually.

The fourth head, Tatsunori Ishimoto, has led the company since 2003. The brewery began exporting to the United States in 1999, the company says, and from the 2015 brewing year used only sake-brewing rice. Japanese Wikipedia names Yamada Nishiki from Miki, in Hyogo, and Gohyakumangoku grown under contract by Niigata farmers. In 2017 the company marked its 110th anniversary with a sake called Ichirin Itteki, “one flower, one drop.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Japanese sake names: Born, Nanbu Bijin, Tedorigawa, Koshi no Kanbai, Tamanohikari, Urakasumi and Tengumai. They come from breweries spread across the country rather than from one district — from Iwate and Miyagi in the north-east, through Niigata, to Fukui and Ishikawa on the Sea of Japan coast and to Kyoto — and most of the names on their labels are brands rather than company names, so a single brewery can sell sake under more than one name.

Sake is brewed from rice, water and koji, and many breweries describe their identity through the place, the water and the master brewer, or toji, behind each bottle. Brewers have traditionally belonged to regional guilds, such as the Nanbu toji of Iwate or the Noto toji of Ishikawa, and breweries often name the guild or the brewer in their own story. A label, a brushed name and the region it promises usually carry more of a sake brand’s look than any single bottle shape.

That makes the plain questions worth asking: who founded the brewery and when, who owns it now, where its sake is made, and how its labels have changed. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the brewery says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A small range, renewed slowly.

For decades the range changed rarely. The company lists a seasonal Tokujoshu, made with the brewery’s own shochu, in 1988; an aged kasutori shochu from sake lees in 1990; and a plum liqueur, also made with its own shochu, in 2008. In June 2016 it released the junmai ginjo Sai as a regular product, which it calls its first in 45 years, and in September 2016 a special honjozo from Gohyakumangoku grown in the Oeyama area of Kameda.

The pace has since quickened. In 2022 the company released Lagoon, a sake called FROM NIIGATA sold only to restaurants listed in the Michelin Guide, and the junmai ginjo Amane; in 2023 a ginjo named Shin became the new standard sake; and in 2024 an Ichirin Itteki daiginjo followed. In 2025 the company began offering restaurants a sake highball under the name Gata Ball. Since 2021, it says, it has offered a commemorative sake to every applicant for Niigata City’s coming-of-age ceremony. Japanese Wikipedia records that the two restaurants the company ran under the Koshi no Kanbai name in central Niigata closed at the end of March 2019.

The family keeps a saying, quoted on the company’s homepage, that the secret of the brewer’s craft lies in being bold yet careful and thorough. Its stated mission is to “brew rich time” and to contribute to the future of sake and of its region.

The brand’s name is written 越乃寒梅, and the company’s website is koshinokanbai.co.jp. Romanised spellings vary between “Koshi no Kanbai” and “Koshinokanbai.”

For a design guide, Koshi no Kanbai shows how a single seasonal image, a plum flower in the late snow, can carry a sake whose reputation was made more by a magazine editor than by advertising. Compare Kubota and Hakkaisan, two other Niigata sake houses. For this guide we use plum bark, winter plum and late snow with a Mincho serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Koshi no Kanbai’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.