FEB 26: Nova Brewing Co. Doburoku- Sunflower Edition

SUNFLOWER SAKE CLUB: FEB 2026
ノバ酒造     ノヴァ・ブルーイング 
NOVA BREWING CO. DOBUROKU- SUNFLOWER EDITION

Nova Brewing Company was founded by Emiko Tanabe and James Jin, who met while studying for the kikizake-shi certification in Los Angeles– sake lovers and students, just like you. Emiko, originally from Niigata, ran a business importing nori-alternative sushi wrappers while James was working in sales for the long-established sake & Japanese goods importer Mutual Trading Company. James was already an avid home brewer of beer and sake, while Emiko felt there was a lot of untapped potential and misunderstanding around sake in the US. As often happens with couples in love, they had no conception of the difficulty ahead and optimistically (naively?) set out to combine their interests by founding Los Angeles’ first craft brewery in nearly 70 years. Like a bright new star they named it “Nova”, a nod to James’ passion for astronomy + the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory nearby.

In preparation for opening, James spent several months training as a kurabito at Inaba Shuzo and Kiuchi Shuzo in Ibaraki. Inaba was mainly sake, while Kiuchi– makers of Hitachino Nest– have found far more success in their beer operation, though they do both. James still talks to Inaba-san every year and credits him with much of his foundational learning, but in an interview I conducted October 2024 James was emphatic that essentially none of the Japanese techniques and procedures are directly applicable in the US. If you happened to attend our American Sake masterclass in the lead-up to Fuyu Fest you’d have heard the whole spiel: water, rice, environment, equipment, labor, sales, access, heritage– everything is different. The issues we face are often structural, for example (nearly) all American rice is engineered/adapted to airplane seeding, combine harvesting, and bred with medium-grain varieties for their growing characteristics (yield, stalk length, pesticide tolerance) unlike Japanese rice which is still largely grown by families in small plots. American rice is consolidated and graded based on eating, manufacturing, or beer brewing characteristics, never sake, and important details like harvest, drying, and milling date are unimportant for these applications so they aren’t even recorded– a dumbfounding omission by Japanese standards. As one small example of far-reaching systemic differences, you can see why American brewing issues rarely have Japanese solutions. While James continues to visit Japanese breweries, he said it’s “more about figuring out how to improve our own way” than seeking ongoing education in Japan.

After his internship, James and Emiko set out to build the brewery. They took over a lease on a combination beer brewery + winery in a West Covina industrial park and for lack of outside investors came up with very home-brew solutions: a simple wooden bar and seating, simple decorations, homemade tools, beer and wine equipment, lots of experiments. The essentials for making sake: a refrigerated room for brewing (it is East LA after all), a koji room the size of a small closet, a rice steamer made for commercial dumpling restaurants. Since beer equipment was already in place they started with beer, launching Ginjo 7 in 2020 with rice and the sake yeast kyokai kobo #7. Soon after, they launched their first sake: “Gravity” shizuku junmai daiginjo nama. 

Early 2021, perhaps a few batches in, my husband was visiting our friend in LA and he found a bottle of Gravity at Blackbird liquor store in Santa Monica which he brought home to Portland. I was really gung-ho on trying every non-Japanese sake I could back then, Den had convinced me there was a future in this industry. Many had been disappointments but Nova was the second domestic that really caught my attention and the first made with Calrose rice.

From the start, James has focused on California “Calrose” rice, which is not a single variety but a collection of similar short + medium grain varieties bred in California for our environment, high yield, and industrial-scale farming. Brewers often say it’s difficult to work with because it’s hard so it doesn’t melt into the mash easily, meaning more of the rice is left behind after fermentation which in other words can mean flavor left behind. It has a tendency to make koji with bitter and astringent compounds, increasing over time– making it difficult to sell. Because it’s not uniform: one variety, one farm– brewers must prepare the rice based on averages rather than precision, a difficult ask in a very precise industry.

But most important to James is that Calrose is affordable, available, it’s our local rice. No matter what, he’d need to adapt the recipe to local ingredients and techniques so he’d rather optimize for Calrose than something expensive and unavailable.

“I did a limited release of Yamadanishiki rice sake just to get customer feedback. It does make a difference, mainly because the rice melts into the mash so much easier. More melting equals more flavor, more flavor than Calrose. But still, it’s not necessarily so much better than Gravity, just different. My customers didn’t feel that it’s a significant improvement. It would need to be more than double the price because the rice is more than double in cost. Compared to Japanese Yamadanishiki too, in my experience so far it doesn’t have that same quality. 

I’ve explored Calhikari and other varieties, but for now I’m happy trying to figure out how to work with Calrose. 20% koji is the standard for recipes but that wasn’t working out so I increased the koji ratio for a higher enzyme level to help melt the rice. The water ratio also had to be adjusted. I got different opinions from different brewers in Japan. One said, more water in moromi = helps melt the rice. But if you add more water it also dilutes the flavor… so you add more water to the mash but steaming the kakemai (steamed rice added to the mash) for a low moisture content. This results in higher enzyme content in the water, which gets absorbed by the low moisture content kakemai. But another brewer said the opposite, that it’s better to aim for high moisture in the steamed kakemai so that the rice itself softer, and then you reduce the water content in the moromi so that the enzymes are more concentrated in the liquid. That’s something I need to continue to explore. What is the right balance for our way of making sake?”

June 2021, while preparing my original business plan for Sunflower, I popped down to LA to check out Nova in person and get some business advice from local friends. Gruff but funny, honest and skeptical, I liked James right away and really appreciated his obvious hardworking grit. Everything was delicious but one stood out in particular, scooped from the tank James shared a ladleful of chunky, sweet-tart and effervescent doburoku: my first outside of Japan. Every so often a drink is like a breath of fresh air, water in the desert, a song you just want to play on repeat and this was that moment. I remember thinking, WOW– we need this– the world needs this, this would be so popular,” and I went home with bottles of Eclipse & Shizuku, but could not stop thinking about the unreleased doburoku.

So I came back in 2022, tried his fresh recipe along with my first taste of Nondo doburoku which James had brought back from his trip to Japan. Life went on before I contacted James again in 2024, this time to interview him and represent his sake at an American sake class in Japan. I was thrilled to learn he had updated his recipe for Eclipse and fully embraced the high acidity characteristic of black koji. I also asked about his doburoku, and James was kind enough to send a bottle of the fresh batch… just as delicious as ever. Traveling through Japan that Fall we visited Ine to Agave and Nondo in person, tasting a wide range of fantastic Japanese doburoku from up and coming producers. At Fuyu 2025 we had a few bottles to play with: Fukushima’s Puku-Puku, Shiga’s Happy Taro, this combined with the overwhelming popularity of the yummy-but-unexciting Niwa no Uguisu doburoku we kept on the shelves set the wheels turning with increasing speed. I vowed that as soon as I could leverage our buying power at Sunflower to afford a custom run with James I would do it….not for me, but to bring this satisfying, delicious product to our audience of sake lovers. That I, a notorious nigori skeptic, could champion doburoku as my beverage of choice on a casual weeknight. *I* was sold– hook, line and sinker– and I wanted to take everyone else down with me.

Around June of last year I sent James an email with my doburoku proposal. I knew he’d done a custom run for the folks at Umami Mart in Oakland some time ago and there were issues with refermentation in bottle, but I was 100% confident in James’ sense of responsibility and commitment to improve his recipes and systems. We discussed scale: a custom run is about 40 bottles, and I said I could commit to 20. James asked if there was anything I wanted to customize about the recipe and I had plenty of ideas, but using Luna Koshihikari rice was really at the top of the list. Surprising no one, I’m a bit of a rice snob and Luna Koshihikari is the only domestic rice I’ve had so far that I love just as much as good Japanese rice. Den’s 90 Kimoto Junmai is also made from Luna Koshihikari and it tastes fantastic. Yoshi says it’s a dream to work with– so much so that there’s no need to polish the rice down to 60, 50% because it melts so easily even at 90%, which saves money. My favorite domestic doburoku with my favorite rice was a no-brainer and despite the higher cost I felt that you, our wonderful customers, would be open to giving it a try.

Koshihikari is the OG premium short-grain Japanese eating rice, long cultivated throughout Japan but particularly famous in Niigata, where it commands some of the highest prices in the country. As with all the best things it’s a bit difficult to grow, unsuited to machine work, with lower yields than Calrose varieties but a far better flavor and texture. I love the story of Luna Koshihikari and its champion Wendy Tsuji, described here and in great detail by 3-star restaurant Singlethread here. Wendy is a Bay Area architect and nisei (2nd generation Japanese-American) who saw a gap in the market for truly exceptional domestic short-grain rice, despite the massive size of California’s rice industry. An ocean of decent rice, but nothing truly great. 

“Premium rice is never overly fluorescent white. This usually means it has been over processed or over milled to correct something else. The best umami flavor comes naturally just between the brown bran to white kernel where the true rice flavor lies. I named my rice ‘Luna Koshihikari’, because in Japan the best rice is the color of the moon, a translucent soft ivory. You can both see and taste the organic local freshness and especially the years of experience that the farmers, dryers and mill have put into this beautiful rice.”

In addition to thoughtful cultivation practices which include crop rotation, drill seeding, AWD: alternate wetting and drying (wet rice farming is a huge contributor to global greenhouse gases) and no synthetic chemicals, Luna Koshihikari rice is naturally air-dried. Most rice in the US is dried with hot blowing air, which is faster but leads to harder and more brittle rice and consumes lots of energy. In addition, Luna’s polishing machines are 85% solar powered. The result is exceptional, it breaks down beautifully despite being polished to only ~90% and the flavor is dramatically more tropical and nuanced, the balance naturally sweeter, than his doburoku made with Calrose (which is also lovely, but lighter and different). Because of the long growing period and drying times, the rice wasn’t ready until December… which gave me plenty of time to work on the label.

Let me be frank– I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to art and label design. My best work is my doodles, always. But this was my first project and I really wanted to design a label with the same quietly cute, relaxed and unpretentious sensibility as Sunflower, a scene that suggests LA, hints at the sake inside and how it might make you feel. One of my very early sketches (at left) became the basis of the design and I went through 3 or 4 different versions before I finally simplified and settled on something closer to this original sketch. From our 2024 conversations I knew that James felt frustrated by the sales and marketing side of sake, so I also wanted to test whether an eye- catching, artistic label could help get bottles into customers’ hands. A label as thoughtful and handmade as its contents, I guess. I’m honestly not skilled enough to pull this off to my own standards, but I had to try, and I knew you all would appreciate me giving it a shot.

I never saw the brewing take place of course, but James documented it and I heard later from others that he worked harder on our batch than he ever had before. The added pressure of making a custom brew for us kept James up til 2 or 3 in the morning on New Years Eve building the mash, with constant attention over the course of January to raise the alcohol slowly but surely to only 8% over >3 weeks, building complex tropical notes out of rice, water, and microorganisms. For stability, James pasteurized the doburoku once after bottling and then applied our custom label to each bottle. Finished 1/26/26, it landed on our doorstep only 4 days later, Friday 1/30. With bated breath, I was relieved to pour myself a glass that afternoon and see for myself that this was his best batch yet.

Bigger than ramshackle equipment, hard American rice, or any other physical or structural limitation, American sake brewers face the greatest challenge of all in perceived inauthenticity: the tendency of US consumers to prefer Japanese-made sake, believing it is a more authentic product. But American sake is as authentic as spicy tuna rolls, general tso’s chicken, or butter mochi. It’s neither inferior nor inauthentic, but a proud product of localization: the authentically American adaptation of a Japanese tradition. While many US breweries have a ways to go, on the whole American sake has never been better, and Nova doburoku is by any measure a better doburoku than the Japanese brands on Sunflower’s shelves. James and Emiko work harder than most Japanese brewers and with far more creativity, versatility and curiosity. Their sake has improved in leaps and bounds over 6 years, and from here the sky is the limit. For my part, I’m proud to leverage my position as a trusted and experienced beverage professional to state unequivocally that Nova sake is a bright new star worth watching. It deserves your attention– starting with the dobu :)