Why Is Dassai On Every Japanese Restaurant’s Sake Menu?

If you go to a nice Japanese restaurant in New York, you will almost certainly find Dassai on the sake menu. Its maker Asahi Shuzo exports premium sake to over 35 countries and recorded 17% of the total sake export from Japan in 2021—and the company is just one of around 1,000 sake breweries in the country.

Why is Dassai so popular?

There are two main reasons:

1. The quality that comes from an innovative production system without a toji (brewmaster)—the idea that has been unthinkable in the 2000-year history of Japanese sake.

2. The company’s nimbleness acquired through multiple critical crises in the last 40 years.

A Revival From The Rock Bottom

Asahishuzo was founded in 1948 and until the third generation Hiroshi Sakurai became the president in 1984, it was a small producer of reasonably-priced, average-quality sake in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Actually, Sakurai joined the company to work for his father eight years earlier, but they disagreed on the company’s future direction. So he quit. It was his father’s sudden death that brought him back to the family business, although he had a successful business of his own outside the sake industry.

He decided to succeed the failing business in response to the surviving employees’ desperate calls. The timing could not have been worse: sake consumption had been declining solidly and shochu, another traditional Japanese alcoholic beverage, was quickly replacing the popularity of sake that peaked in 1973. The company’s books directly reflected the challenging environment.

“Why is our sake not selling?” As Sakurai looked into it, he noticed that a tiny segment of the business was doing well. It was the premium sake category. He decided to shift the company’s focus to refined sake and changed the brand name to Dassai. Accordingly, the business began heading in the right direction, but in 1992, Sakurai also started a craft beer business to solidify the company’s financial base—a big mistake. He ended up carrying a $1.5 million debt from the failure. His sake brewery workers, including the brewmaster, left for fear that they would not get paid.

The well-established belief within the sake industry was that you could not make sake without a brewmaster. But he was unable to hire a new one.

It was, however, the moment the current success of Dassai began. That was in 1998.

Brewmaster’s Hunches Scientifically Unveiled

Given no choice, Sakurai decided to eliminate the brewmaster's position in the operations and fully rely on science. He and his remaining workers broke down the toji’s tasks and analyzed each step to back up with data. “We made all the elements of the sake production process visible so that we could spot where to improve right away,” says Sakurai.

The benefits of the new system surpassed what they expected at the beginning.

In the absence of the brewmaster, the brewery team became free to pursue their ideal sake without worrying about stepping on someone’s toes. Also, year-round sake brewing became possible, because a traditional toji was a seasonal worker hired only for the sake production period during the winter.

Science and tradition sound like oil and water but the company managed to take advantage of both. “Some people say Dassai is going to be made by AI,” Sakurai laughs. “But data are not recipes. We need to be as analog as in the traditional system.”

For example, managing the temperature of the mash during fermentation sounds easy with high-tech sensors and a computer. But machines cannot handle the slight variations of rice quality that come from different paddies or the vitality of the yeast used for the batch. That is why the brewery staff constantly smells and sometimes tastes the mash to check the condition.

If It Does Not Sell, Detect The Potential

Back in the 1990s, Sakurai managed to produce superior products ready to sell but the local market was extremely small with around 300 residents. By expanding to the bigger cities nearby like Hiroshima, the company would face fierce competition with bigger breweries and the prospect was quite dismal.

Instead, he entered metropolitan Tokyo where there was more room for new players. With no connections, Sakurai personally visited retailers and restaurants and asked to carry his sake. Luckily, people from Yamaguchi Prefecture supported the sake from their homeland and Dassai’s sales took off.

But he did not stop there. He saw that the aging Japanese society would not provide a bright future for his company. He began exporting abroad in 2003. He skipped trade-tasting events as it is hard to stand out among numerous brands. Just as he did in Tokyo, he and his son and now the fourth-generation president of the company Kazuhiro visited local retailers and restaurants in major cities like New York, Paris and Milan and gradually convinced them that their sake was worth selling.

A breakthrough came when top French chefs, such as Alain Ducasse, Michel Troisgros and Joel Robuchon introduced Dassai to their beverage lists and its global reputation skyrocketed. (Eventually, Robuchon invited the company to open a gastronomic complex together and Dassaï Joël Robuchon in Paris in 2018.)

How come French chefs liked Dassai so much?

Because the company positioned Dassai outside the context of Japanese cuisine and changed their perception of sake.

“Selling sake as a part of Japanese cuisine was limiting the future growth of our brand. So we decided to market Dassai as a beverage that has a universal appeal like Champagne,” says Sakurai.

Obsessed With Innovation, Failures Encouraged

In order to prove Dassai to be as elegant as Champagne, all Dassai labels are junmai daiginjo, the most refined style of sake; the company uses only Yamadanishiki, the king of the rice varieties used to make sake.

To be classified as junmai daiginjo, the rice must be milled down to at least 50%. By removing the outer layer of the grains, the sake becomes delicately fragrant to maximize the pure flavors of the rice itself. But the company went much further. Its flagship label is Dassai 23. “23” represents the remaining percentage of rice after milling. At the launch in 1992, it was the highest milling rate before any other breweries. In 2013, the company released Dassai Beyond whose milling rate is 16-17% depending on the rice for the batch.

The resulting sake has “toumeikan” or a sense of translucency, the quintessential flavor characteristic of Dassai.

In 2000, the company introduced a centrifuge for the first time in the industry. Traditionally, the process of separating mash into liquid and sake lees has been done by compression, which can impart unwanted flavor elements into the liquid. Centrifuge eliminates this issue and maximizes its lush and delicate fragrance. The cost of the centrifuge is enormous and the yields are lower than the traditional method. “But it is worth the investment. We need to get to where we want to be,” says Kazuhiro.

The company’s newest label is Dassai Hayata, which is made using a novel technology that can minimize the loss of freshness through a no-heat pasteurization process.

The father and the son seem obsessed with innovation. “My father and I go to work every day unless we are traveling. On a Friday, we and our team may decide what we are going to try on Monday, but the decision may switch to a completely different direction during the weekend through a discussion between my father and me. We feel sorry for our staff,” Kazuhiro says.

Innovation often carries a lot of risks.

“One of the biggest lessons from my father is that it’s OK to fail. It is so much better than not doing anything and facing a bigger failure later as he painfully learned in the past. We encourage our employees to try new things and if they fail, to analyze the cause and learn from it.”

Is Dassai A Black Sheep In The Sake Industry?

Sake has been increasingly popular globally and 2021 recorded the highest number of sake exports both by value and by quantity; the value increased by 560% and the quantity by 268% since 2009. And as mentioned earlier, Dassai accounted for a whopping 17% of the total export by value.

Despite Dassai’s noticeable contribution to the sake industry’s growth abroad, some regard Asahi Shuzo as an outlier.

Some breweries are not sure about the company’s science-based production system. Some distributors dislike the company because they feel excluded from the company’s sales network. Dassai is sold only through approximately 400 retailers and 700 high-end supermarkets and department stores throughout Japan. “We see them as our partners who can build and solidify the value of our brand together,” says Kazuhiro. “Sake is very sensitive to light and temperature and if it goes through multiple shipments, the quality deteriorates. We have to make sure that Dassai’s quality is maintained until it reaches where it is consumed and these distributors are on the same page with us.”

However, some others are grateful for what the Dassai brand has done for the entire sake industry. “We thank Dassai for expanding the industry’s global opportunities by offering high-quality sake,“ says Yusuke Sato, the eighth-generation president of Aramasa Shuzo in Akita Prefecture, in a Japanese interview article.

The company does not care how they are perceived though. “We don’t think that we are leading the industry at all. The industry needs diversity to prosper and we are only one of the players.”

Then, what is next for Dassai?

Asahi Shuzo is opening a brewery in Hyde Park, New York, later in 2022.

The project began when the Culinary Institute of America, the top culinary school in the U.S., approached Asahi Shuzo. As Japanese food becomes increasingly popular, sake is also gaining attention. The C.I.A. needed to educate its students with in-depth knowledge and experience of a reliable partner.

“New York is the city of creativity. It can break the existing mold of anything. The C.I.A. is a wonderful collaborator to make Japanese sake a global beverage,” says Kazuhiro.

The sake made at the new brewery will be called Dassai Blue. In Japanese, the name connotes it can exceed Dassai. He says, “We are intentionally making a strong competitor that can beat the parent in Japan. We believe that healthy competition will keep us motivated to make the best sake possible.”