A failing heir bet the family sake brewery on premium-only Dassai and took on champagne

Hiroshi Sakurai took over Asahi Shuzo in 1984, a family brewery in a depopulated part of Yamaguchi Prefecture making inexpensive sake for the local market. Sales kept sliding until they fell below ¥100M a year. Then the toji — the chief brewer the whole trade depended on — quit, leaving four employees to handle production. Sakurai later said he could make the decisions that followed precisely because the company was a loser with nothing left to lose.

He steered the brewery into junmai daiginjo, sake milled from rice polished to a small fraction of its weight, the hardest and most expensive category to brew. The company had no stable production technology at the time. It standardized brewing on machine-controlled temperatures, ran the process year-round instead of only in winter, and iterated in small batches — which improved quality fast and kept prices low. Sakurai brand-named the flagship Dassai and pushed into the Tokyo market, a decisive break from a brewery that could barely hold its home region.

The bet worked: Dassai became the face of Japan's premium sake boom abroad, and the United States overtook every other market for sake exports in 2022. In 2017 Sakurai decided to build the company's first overseas brewery in Hyde Park, New York. The $80M project — nearly triple the planned ¥3B, delayed four years by the pandemic and water-treatment rules — opened in 2023 with annual capacity of 140,000 nine-liter cases of junmai daiginjo and a partnership with the Culinary Institute of America next door.

Dassai became Japan's leading premium sake brand. By 2023 Asahi Shuzo sold about ¥16.5B a year and ran an $80M, 55,000-square-foot brewery in New York.

With sales under ¥100M and the master brewer gone, staying a cheap local sake maker meant slow liquidation — the riskiest pivot was the rational one.

Sakurai chose the premium category deliberately — junmai daiginjo rewarded precision, which a tiny team could encode into machines and data rather than depend on a hired master brewer's intuition.

Machine temperature control enabled year-round brewing, raising utilization and letting Dassai price premium sake within reach of restaurants everywhere.

The New York move committed nearly half a year's revenue — around ¥8B against ¥16.5B in sales — to localization: brewing in America with locally grown rice rather than exporting from Japan.

Sakurai framed the competition as wine and champagne, not other sake brands, which set the benchmark for quality, price and placement in general US restaurants rather than Japanese ones.

With nothing left to lose, drop the mix that is killing you. Sakurai kept only the hardest category and encoded quality in machines — turning a four-person remnant into a premium exporter.

The Hyde Park brewery opened in October 2023 as Dassai Blue, with three veteran brewers transferred from Japan, a rice-polishing facility, tours modeled on a museum, and a plan to move from imported Yamada-Nishiki rice to rice grown in Arkansas. The company aims to grow New York output more than tenfold over the coming years. Sakurai, then 72, moved with his wife to live near the brewery, saying Dassai Blue should surpass the sake made in Japan — the same willingness to jump before feeling ready that saved the company in the 1980s.