6th Generation Brewer Sato Jumpei's Resume
First Year of Liqueurs ("TATENOKAWA" Newspaper 08/08/2014)
Thank you for reading my resume.
In the last issue , I took you on a whistle stop tour of how we went from commercialisation of our plum wine to liqueurs made from fruit grown in Yamagata.
In the first year of liqueur production, we started to follow the plum wine with products made from fruits that are the taste of winter and autumn in Yamagata like La France pear, grapes, apple etc.
As I am sure you aware, there were already a number of companies in Yamagata Prefecture shipping plum wine, and by this point, a lot of plum-wine-making-breweries in the country too, so we knew to an extent to expect competition. That is why we started to brainstorm whether we could come up with a unique product by trying to capture the traits of both TATENOKAWA,Inc. and Yamagata Prefecture.
I would often pop into the local roadside stations and farmer’s markets and seeing the richness of the fruits from Yamagata on display got me thinking about whether as a local brewery there was anything that we could do. The season for fruit is very short, in its fresh form about one month. Therefore the supply routes are very restricted and there are limits to what extent and how long you can maintain the flavour. I wanted to overcome that problem, to tell all of Japan about the wonder of fruit grown in Yamagata Prefecture, and at the same time expand its consumption by first converting it into a juice, and then making it into a sweet-sour alcoholic beverage. The result is “fruits liqueurs”.
50-60% of the fruit juice would be used. The taste would be like drinking juice. Increasing the varieties would offer a fun selection. The first year of liqueur production was filled with the joy of product development as the concept began to take shape.
* The desire to “promote the fruit of Yamagata” is what gave birth to “KODAKARA”.
6th Generation Brewer Sato Jumpei
