On Thursday, July 22ed, I decided to go to a “Meet the brewer” meeting that was being hosted by SakeOne at Zella Sake House. I learnt about this gathering from a tweet by Marcus Pakiser who is a local sake expert working for Youngs Columbia, a distributing company. Having never gone to this type of event for sake I was not sure what to expect. Portland is a huge craft beer town and has this type of event weekly in the beer context with the primary audience being home brewers. However, the homebrew sake community is much smaller so I did not expect many other sake brewers to be present. Despite this I put together a list of questions that I hoped I would have the chance to ask the Yoshinogawa Toji.
Zella’s is a small sake bar so I was a little worried that if I did not show up early there would be no place to sit. Living on the west side of town means that I would have about 45 minutes to get to Zella’s but I gave myself an hour and fifteen minute just to be on the safe side. As it turned out, the first bridge I tried to take was closed. Portland is split in half with the Willamette river dividing the east side from west. Following the detour at rush hour eventually got me across the river and I arrived at Zella’s with a few minutes to spare. I want in and was asked if I was part of the sake tasting group. I said I was and was seated at a reserved table. It turned out that the table was reserved for the SakeOne group and I was asked to move once they arrived. I felt a little silly but no big deal, this only meant that the show would get started soon. Continue reading “Meet the Brewer Event for Yoshinogawa”