Sometime late last year I had the pleasure of tasting a fantastic nama sake at two different places in Northern California.
The brewery is located in Shimane Prefecture, and the brew master used to work at Nanbu Bijin (Southern Beauty), which NB was featured in a separate documentary “Kampai! For the Love of Sake” (worth watching if you enjoyed the Netflix sake documentary about Tedorigawa/The Birth of Sake).
The sake is called Kakeya, is packed with delicious umami and one of the best and most well balanced ones I’ve tasted. A few of you like the Born Muroka Nama Genshu Junmai Daiginjo, but do give the Kakeya a try, which is a JUNMAI Muroka Nama Genshu. It’s great with izakaya fare and might do well with sushi. In fact all of their product lines are all interestingly, Muroka Nama Genshu (non charcoal filtered, unpasteurized, and undiluted).
Also had the pleasure of trying their not ready for export Junmai Daiginjo version, NOTO and it is quite excellent. They will export the Noto next year sometime, and luckily I encountered it again in Tokyo at the Aoyama Farmer’s Market recently on a Sunday. They have a Junmai Ginjo nama (Muroka Name Genshu) and another Kakeya variant called “snow” seasonal release which unfortunately are not for export, at least not yet.
More info at http://artofsake.com/
Supposedly Hi Time in Costa Mesa sells it, as does Santa Anita Wines in Arcadia.
Shibumi and Kinjiro now carry it (Kinjiro’s website even lists it now at $75 which is about x2 retail, quite reasonable), as does Oshima in OC (for the full list, go to the website).
So give it a try! And no, I do not work for these folks.