I want to start by saying I was in the area for business and was looking for things to do, and for that, this place was great. This is very different from selecting a travel destination based on local attractions, which I'm not sure this place rises to the level of.
I got to the Sake Brewing Museum at opening, and started in the gift shop/tasting area. The free flowing water was interesting, almost creamy. There was a token machine next to the sake tasting where you could exchange coins for tokens used to redeem tastings. As I only had three 100 coins, this afforded me four tastings (100 - 1 token, 200 - 3 tokens; at higher prices, the exchange rate became progressively favorable). I'm not a conneusoir at all, but the three sakes and one gin (surprise!) I sampled were great!
Shout out to the ridiculously inexpensive (
🌟Jeff's Guide🌟
✅ Tasting of 12 types of sake at a very affordable price. ¥1000 yen for 18 tokens (15ml x 18 times = 270ml). Variety of aroma and spiciness of sake are available l. You could easily found the one you are fond of🍶
✅ You can enjoy free flowing drinkable water in the shop in between your each tasting of sake. Free cups are available next to the counter (larger than the paper cup for sake next to the sake machine).
✅ You can also bring your own container to collect the drinkable water (claimed to be flowed from the melt ice on the mountain) but each group of participants is limited to take at most 20L daily, though it seems to be a bit unrelated to the tourists🤷🏻♂️
✅ Museum available just next to the souvenir shop. Once I opened the door, a strong sake smell flushed into my 👃. Although most exhibited items are having introductions in Japanese, there is a multilingual video to introduce the history of the Otokoyama Company history and the procedures in making the sake. Spending around 15mins for the museum is enough.🍶
✅ Many amusement facilities for kids at the entrance and inside the souvenir shop so that parents can spend some time to make themselves enjoyable.🛝🧑🧑🧒🧒👦
✅ The soft serve (non-alcoholic) and the sake ice cream (alcoholic) are also worth their prices with very unique aroma that I could not explain in words🍦🍨
Museum and the shop located in different buildings. Museum is free and self guided. You can exchange coins to sample different sake. There’s also spring water available for free if you want (many locals fill up bottles there). Toilet available and plenty of parking spaces.
Tasting room was quite delightful with free samples and an excellent range of Sake, Gin etc to purchase.
The tour was very informative, to give you the best experience go up to the top (3rd) floor and watch the video in your chosen language then walk back down level by level.
Top tip. Take an empty water bottle - they have free running taps with some of the purest water I have ever tasted and you can fill your own for free. We went in Winter but there is also a playpark for kids that looks fun in summer
Really good experience here.
The museum is a little disappointing, not very foreigner friendly, there isn’t a lot of explanation in English, and it was not that interesting either.
The tasting is not free but still worth it. We got 500 yen for 8 cups(15ml each) not a lot but it’s still very nice. It has 11 types of sake, and 1 gin. Some of them is really nice and interesting. We get to really try to different taste of sake. The area is really crowded with tour groups, so it is really noisy, we kinda hope that the would be a separate area for tasting, away from cafe, so we can taste quietly.
There is also free water used to brew sake. Although I don’t really taste anything, it’s fun.
If you wanna taste, don’t drive there.
Overall it is really worth it.
