An Edo-period brewery on the Kaga Plain.

Tengumai is the sake brand of Shata Shuzo (株式会社車多酒造), a brewery in Bomaru-machi, in the city of Hakusan, Ishikawa Prefecture. The company dates its founding to 1823 — the sixth year of the Bunsei era, late in the Edo period — and its website still gives the date in that era form. The brewery sits on the Kaga Plain, facing Mount Hakusan, and the company says its sake is brewed with groundwater from the mountain and rice grown on the plain.

The name comes with a story the company has told in English since at least 2011. On its archived English page, Shata Shuzo said that when the brewery was founded it was surrounded by dense forest, where it looked as if a tengu — a creature of Japanese folklore seen as a guardian of mountains — might be living. The name “Tengumai,” dancing tengu, came from the idea that even a tengu would feel like dancing after drinking the sake, the page said, adding that the Shata family had made sake in the same countryside ever since. The Ishikawa Food Association’s English product pages give the same account.

The business has stayed with the family. In 2012 the company’s website named 車多壽郎, whom it describes as the seventh head of the house, as representative director; today it names Kazunari Shata (車多一成) in that role. Premium Japan, in a February 2020 profile, described Kazunari as the eighth-generation president and a former banker, and the US sake retailer Umami Mart described the brewery as still family-owned in February 2026.

Yamahai, Noto toji and a golden colour.

Tengumai’s reputation rests on yamahai, a slow way of making the yeast starter that draws on lactic bacteria from the brewery’s surroundings rather than on added lactic acid. Shata Shuzo says it brews much of its sake this way, and that its house version — “Tengumai-style yamahai” — was built in the Showa 40s, the decade from the mid-1960s, by the seventh head of the house and the brewery’s toji, Naka Saburo (中三郎), and has been refined a little every year since. Japanese Wikipedia says the brewery releases a limited daiginjo namazake each year named after him.

On an archived page from around 2012, the company wrote that Tengumai had become almost a by-word for yamahai junmai sake. It explained that most breweries now use the faster sokujo method, in which lactic acid is added, so craftsmen who know yamahai have become scarce, and said it kept to yamahai because it believed the true flavour of sake came from it.

The brewery also ties itself to the Noto toji, the master brewers of the Noto Peninsula. The first of the eight policies on its website is to brew sake that is good to drink and to carry on the Noto toji’s culture of making sake by hand. The company says it relies on machines for polishing, washing and pressing, steps it says do not affect quality, but makes its koji and starters by hand; an archived page added that all the brown rice it buys is polished in its own mill. In May 2023 its news page named Kenji Okada (岡田謙治) as the company’s toji.

The house also has a colour. Shata Shuzo calls its sake “yamabuki-iro,” the golden yellow of the kerria flower. It says its regular sake is aged at the brewery before bottling, that it avoids activated charcoal — used to adjust a sake’s colour — as far as it can, and that its koji is grown with more mould than usual, so even freshly pressed sake comes out yellowish. Its archived English page said the golden colour of its yamahai junmai “delights the eye as well.” That yellow is the starting point for the palette in this guide.

Sake, place 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.

Two hundred years, then an earthquake.

Shata Shuzo marked its 200th anniversary in 2023, its news page says. Umami Mart, writing in February 2026, said a Tengumai 50 Junmai Daiginjo was first made that year for the anniversary, and quoted Takayuki Kakinuma of Shata Shuzo on the tengu drawn on its labels: “a tengu facing left is looking to the past, while a tengu facing right is looking to the future.”

On 1 January 2024 a magnitude-7.5 earthquake struck Ishikawa, hitting the Noto Peninsula hardest. On 4 January the company reported that the brewery had escaped with minor damage and that every one of its brewers and their families were safe, but that brewers’ homes had been badly damaged, so it would delay its brewing schedule and cut production sharply. Shata Shuzo then helped breweries in Noto. A Makuake crowdfunding page for Sakurada Shuzo of Suzu, which ran to April 2024, said Sakurada had begun its first post-quake brewing in Shata Shuzo’s facility in Hakusan, and Kakinuma told Umami Mart that Shata Shuzo rescued mash from affected breweries, including Sakurada, and bottled it.

The range on the company’s website runs from junmai and ginjo to junmai daiginjo, honjozo and ordinary sake, with seasonal and limited releases, umeshu and shochu; the company also runs a shop, TENGUMAI CRAFT SAKE SHOP mau. In February 2023 it launched a Tengumai fresh chocolate made with its yamahai junmai daiginjo, in collaboration with the Yokohama chocolatier Silsmaria. In 2012 it also ran a separate website for a second label, Gorin (五凛).

For a design guide, Tengumai shows how a folklore name, a brewing method and even a colour can carry a brand. Compare Tedorigawa, another Ishikawa sake, and Kokuryu, from neighbouring Fukui. For this guide we use yamabuki gold, lacquer red and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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