Tochigi Prefecture runs deep with sake heritage—but for a fleeting window each spring, that heritage travels to the heart of Tokyo at Craft Sake Week 2026, the world's largest sake event. Now in its landmark 10th anniversary year, the event runs April 17 to 29 at Roppongi Hills Arena in Tokyo, where 130 handpicked breweries from across Japan gather across 13 days of rotating themes, paired with some of the country's most acclaimed restaurants.
Tochigi is among the prefectures represented at the event, distinguished by its particularly strong sake heritage. Stretching from the fertile Kanto plains up into the cedar-clad mountains of Nikko, it is a region where rich agricultural land and generations of brewing knowledge combine to produce some of the country’s most distinctive nihonshu.
Of the dozens of breweries working across the prefecture, two stand out not just for the quality of what they make, but for the very different ways they approach the craft—and both are well worth building a trip around.
Kobayashi Brewery, producer of the Houou Biden label, bridges past and present—a traditional house that has evolved without losing its roots. Senkin Brewery in Sakura City goes deeper with a brewery committed to recovering and preserving pre-industrial techniques and organic farming.
Both breweries are featured participants in Craft Sake Week 2026. Meeting these breweries on home turf, though, is another experience entirely.
Read on to find out what makes each one worth the trip…
Kobayashi Brewery—Houou Biden: 150 Years in Mita
Kobayashi Brewery was founded in 1872, in the fifth year of the Meiji era (1868 - 1912), making it one of Tochigi's oldest surviving breweries. For 150 years it has stood more or less in the same spot, doing more or less the same thing: drawing on snowmelt from the Nikko range, selecting the finest local rice, and transforming both into ginjo sake of uncommon elegance. The house style ginjo is sake brewed from highly polished rice, fermented slowly at low temperatures to coax out aromatic compounds that don't exist in ordinary brewing.
The brewery is led today by 5th-generation president Masaki Kobayashi, and its flagship label, Houou Biden (phoenix of the beautiful paddy fields), a ginjo brewed from rice polished to 50% of its original size、has become one of the most sought-after names in Japanese sake. The kura (warehouse) sits along the old Nikko Reiheishi Kaido, the ancient ceremonial road that once carried offerings to the Nikko shrines—in what was historically known as Mita Village, a name that translates poetically as "beautiful rice paddy village."
The tour experience
Visiting Kobayashi Brewery allows you to walk into a working kura that has been continuously active for over a century. Visitors have the chance to learn how the brewery's water sourcing works, why sake fermentation requires such precise temperature management, and what distinguishes Houou Biden's style from the broader spectrum of Japanese sake.
The main brewery complex retains its traditional wooden architecture, and a tour here offers a rare look at how small-scale brewing actually works—from the steaming of rice and the cultivation rooms, where koji, the mold that converts starches into fermentable sugars is carefully tended, to the fermentation tanks where the sake slowly takes shape.
In this particular tour, president Masaki Kobayashi personally leads the process with patience and precision, walking visitors through each room and explaining what is happening at every stage. It begins with the koji rooms. The first room is warm and humid—steamed rice has just been introduced to the koji mold spores, and the fermentation culture is in its earliest, most delicate phase. The second room is hotter and drier, where the koji is developing more actively, the rice grains hardening slightly as the mold works deeper into the starch—a faint sweetness already detectable in the air. By the third room, the koji is fully developed and ready: dry, firm, and fragrant.
From there the tour moves into the broader brewing process—how the finished koji is combined with water and yeast to build the fermentation starter, how that starter is gradually scaled up in the large fermentation tanks, and finally how the fully fermented mash is pressed to separate the clear sake from the remaining solids.
The tour culminates, naturally, in tasting—the chance to sample directly from a brewery that produces one of Japan's most acclaimed ginjo labels should not be rushed.
For another part of the tour, visitors could also visit Kobayashi Brewery’s modern production facility, Hisyo Kura, purpose-built to meet the precision demands of ginjo brewing at scale using modern machines without compromising the craft. Temperature-controlled fermentation rooms maintain the consistently low conditions that ginjo requires, and the equipment—from the rice-washing and steaming lines to the pressing and filtration systems—is calibrated for the kind of careful, small-batch work that defines the Houou Biden style.
The main Kobayashi Brewery is located at 743-1 Sotoshima, Oyama City, Tochigi. Hisyo Kura stands near the original kura. For tour details and reservations, visit hououbiden.jp.
Product lines and sake notes
If you've never had Houou Biden before, expect the aroma of fruits like muscat melon and apple on the nose and a dry finish that lingers longer than you'd expect. That is the house signature, and it runs consistently across the range.
The Akaban Junmai Daiginjo, among the widely known bottle and the one most sake shops outside Japan tend to carry first—clean, aromatic, and a reliable entry point into what the brewery does. The Asahi Mai Junmai Daiginjo steps it up: brewed from a rare heirloom rice variety, it is velvety and round, with mango and coconut layered beneath the signature muscat, and has become one of the brewery's most internationally acclaimed expressions. The Black Phoenix, made with Aiyama rice from Hyogo, goes richer and warmer—tropical fruit and ripe melon.
The brewery also produces a special line of sake with different flavors under its Nikko series, developed in partnership with Nikko branding initiatives and sold at prestige venues. It comes in three varieties built around locally grown Yumesasara rice and the sacred water of the Nikko shrines, ranging from a soft, fruity Junmai Ginjoshu to the ultra-refined Mikumari Junmai Daiginjo, polished to an extreme 25% and designed to taste, in the brewery's own words, like standing in the holy land of Nikko—plus a distilled spirit aged in Nikko oak barrels.
Senkin Brewery: Radical Tradition in Sakura City
Drive about an hour northeast from Oyama and you arrive in Sakura City, a town whose name means "cherry blossom" and whose most famous sake producer has become one of the most philosophically rigorous breweries in all of Japan: Senkin Brewery.
Senkin Brewery was founded in 1806, during the heart of the Edo period (1603 – 1868), making it the oldest surviving brewery in Tochigi Prefecture. For over two centuries the Usui family brewed sake in its same, original site in Sakura, passing the label down through generations until 2008, when the brewery was brought to the edge of collapse and had to be liquidated and restarted from scratch.
It was the 11th-generation brothers who rebuilt it: Kazuki Usui, a former wine sommelier who took over as CEO, and his younger brother Masato, who trained at a brewery in Yamanashi and became toji (brewmaster). Together they made a decision that would change the brewery's trajectory entirely—and, as it turned out, influence the direction of Japanese sake more broadly.
Senkin's symbol is the crane, a bird said to live in the celestial realm and its three founding colors tell you everything about the brewery's self-image: red for love, white for tradition, black for innovation. The flagship label Senkin is brewed under their Edo-gaeri philosophy using kimoto fermentation, organic rice, and the same underground water source that feeds the paddies where their grain is grown, has since become one of the most talked-about names in contemporary nihonshu.
The tour experience
A tour at Senkin is an immersion in a traditional sake world. The brewery occupies a centuries-old kura built from Oya stone, a volcanic rock quarried only in Tochigi, along the same stretch of the old Oshu Kaido where it has stood since 1806.
The guided tour walks visitors through the entire process that makes Senkin’s approach so distinct. Every grain of rice in this building traces back to the same underground water source beneath Sakura City, the same water feeding the paddies outside where the brewery's own organic Kame-no-o rice grows.
The lessons start through the rice program first, explaining the significance of this ancient grain variety and what it takes to recover its original DNA in a modern agricultural context. From the field, the process moves inside: rice is steamed and brought into dedicated koji cultivation rooms, where the mold is grown on the grain using only the wild microorganisms naturally present in the kura itself—nothing introduced from outside. That cultivated koji then feeds into the kimoto fermentation process (one of the oldest methods in sake brewing), in which natural lactic acid bacteria from the brewery environment are developed from scratch rather than added as a commercial shortcut. It is one of the most labor-intensive methods in sake brewing, requiring brewers to physically stir the fermenting mash repeatedly over many cold winter nights.
The mash eventually moves into the fermentation rooms, where it develops slowly in wooden kioke vats, each holding 3,000 liters, rather than stainless steel tanks, the air carrying the particular alive, slightly earthy smell of a kimoto brew in progress. Senkin uses every step of this process because they believe it produces the most complex and living sake possible.
As with any great brewery tour, the experience concludes with tasting—an opportunity to work through the different expression families and understand, through your palate, what the Edo-gaeri philosophy actually produces in the glass.
Senkin Brewery sits at 106 Baba, Sakura City, Tochigi. For more information, visit senkin.co.jp.
Product lines and sake notes
Senkin's lineup is divided into four families, each expressing a different facet of the Edo-gaeri philosophy. The Organic Nature series is the flagship organic expression, with variants including a nigori (unfiltered), a kijoshu (a rich, sweet style made by substituting sake for water in the final fermentation stage), and a sparkling version. The Modern Senkin line applies the brewery's traditional techniques to a contemporary aesthetic. Retro Senkin leans deliberately into older flavor profiles and presentations. And Classic Senkin represents the most pure expression of the brewery's kimoto and traditional fermentation methods. There is also a Premium range for special releases.
Go where the sake is
Both breweries are accessible from Tokyo by Shinkansen—Oyama Station (Kobayashi Brewery) is roughly 40 minutes from Ueno on the Tohoku Shinkansen, while Sakura City (Senkin) is most easily reached via the Utsunomiya line to Utsunomiya and then a local train or taxi.
A dedicated sake itinerary combining both breweries in a single day is feasible, though a weekend with a night in between allows for a more relaxed experience and the chance to pair your brewery visits with Tochigi's other considerable pleasures—not least the temples and waterfalls of Nikko, which Kobayashi Brewery considers its spiritual home ground.
Tours at both breweries are available year-round and are best arranged in advance through the respective websites. Groups and individuals are both typically welcome, and English-language support varies; it's worth confirming arrangements before your visit.
If a trip to Tochigi isn't in the cards, especially for tourists, both Kobayashi’s Houou Biden and Senkin will be pouring at Craft Sake Week 2026. It's a far easier entry point for visitors based in Tokyo or passing through, and a genuine way to encounter not just Tochigi’s breweries but everything else Japan has to offer.
If you can make just one day, aim for April 17, the opening day, which kicks off with a sparkling sake toast and features an omakase dining experience alongside the breweries—the closest thing to a curated introduction to the best of what Japanese sake has to offer right now.
For more information, check the full schedule of Craft Sake Week 2026.
