Catching up on 5 years of Zenkuro with founder David Joll

0:21Welcome back and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Sake on Air, the world's first podcast dedicated to expanding the dialogue surrounding Japan's iconic beverages, sake, shochu, and awamori. The show is made possible with the fantastic support of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association. My name is Sébastien Lemoine, one of the regular navigators on the show, and I'm joined today by Mary, Mary Nagata. It's great to have you on the show, Mary. Thanks, it's good to be back. And of course, there's a good reason why you're here today, because we have a very special host, We're very happy to welcome David Joel from Vancouver, a sake brewery located in Queenstown in New Zealand.

1:04It's actually an overdue catch-up because the SOA team had the pleasure of interviewing Dave together with Matt Kingsley-Show from Melbourne Sake more than five years ago now. No way. It's been that long? Yeah, I think it was February 2020 or so. So I invite our listeners to get back to episodes 35 and 36 using our website or your podcast platform. And I promise this is really good fun. It's great to have you, Dave. And welcome to Tokyo. Thank you, Sebastian. It's great to be back. May I ask you to introduce yourself again and talk a little bit about the Incuro then? Yeah, sure. I'm Dave Joel from New Zealand.

1:50I lived in Japan when I was younger high school, university and then I was a Sareriman in Tokyo here and I've been back in New Zealand for nearly 30 years now but I've been coming and going between Japan and New Zealand it's kind of part of what I do and about 10 years ago along with a bunch of mates who've all had experiences in Japan and my wife, we started up a New Zealand's first sake brewery in Queenstown. It's right down the bottom of the South Island. It's kind of an alpine resort town with a very dry, cool, clean climate and lots of beautiful water. So we thought it was a good place to try a hand at making sake.

2:47And Mary, you have a special relationship. Who is Zenkuro? Can you remind us a bit about it? Of course. So Dave here is not only my former boss, he is the Kuramoto Antoji. And I was one simple kurabito back in the day when I did work for him in Zenkuro. But more so than that, he's not only an inspiration, right, because he owns and operates his small brewery. And really a dear friend. He's almost like my kiwi dad. not quite as old as my own dad but you know like I basically you know New Zealand and Queenstown wouldn't be the same without Dave you know I was trying to think of myself as as your Kiwi big brother but no Marie he consists of you being the dad so I'm just sort of getting used to that yeah I mean first of all I mean congratulations because I think Mary when you worked for Venkoro, you were doing batch 18.

3:51And five years ago, when we interviewed you, Dave, you had just produced batch 50. And this was made from car rows, polished down to 60 % and 901 yeast. And I understand you're now over 150 batches. So always very modest. You called yourself a newbie, but now you've built so much experience. Yeah, well, this is actually our 10th year since we started. In 2015, we started, and it's now 10 years later, and we're up to batch. When I go back next week, we'll be putting together batch number 160. So, yeah, it's kind of hard to believe, but I do still feel like we're newbies. You're still learning batch by batch, and 10 years is not really very long in the big scheme of things compared to all the Japanese brewers out there that have been going for hundreds of years.

4:58So, yeah, we do feel still we've just got a long way to go, but we're feeling quite comfortable with the style. We've definitely got a style of our own now. okay i mean we will get back to that i mean for for our listeners i mean we we want to catch up with with dave personally but we we want to understand as well some of the changes that he's been through i mean changes in the environment of the brewery and changes that he made at the brewery in terms of uh facilities and and and processes so can you share with us what's changed around you i'm talking about local sake consumption or or what your customers want from you today and actually who your customers are.

5:42Right, right. Yeah, sake consumption in New Zealand, I feel that without having any cold hard figures in front of me, it's definitely, people are more aware of sake now. When I spoke to you last time, probably most people didn't actually know what sake was. They never tried it, but I think that's changing. our customers are mainly New Zealanders perhaps when we started we were thinking a little bit more about Japanese visitors but that idea changed quite quickly and we're still targeting New Zealanders our main target market and we get a lot of visitors being where we are in Queenstown particularly from Australia, United States, Canada, Singapore, I'm talking about overseas visitors, and increasingly more Japanese visitors actually visiting our brewery, which is pretty cool.

6:51A good friend of mine from Tokyo just went to visit you, you were already in Japan though, my friend Nanoha, she was there just a week ago or so. Yeah, I missed her, unfortunately, but I'm going to catch up. Yes, yeah, it's pretty interesting. A lot of young people coming to New Zealand, some on working holidays and some just for a visit. And there's young people staying there and their parents visit them and they bring along their parents. Quite often it's their parents that are interested in sake or their dance, I guess. and ask if they can go and try the New Zealand sake. If the figure is not confidential, what's the proportion between on-trade sales and sales at the brewery?

7:42We're probably about still only 10 % of our sales are at the brewery. Okay. So our main market is restaurants. So we have a distributor now. So we are based in Auckland. They probably take almost half the sake we produce and then they distribute it onto restaurants. And most of these restaurants are not Japanese food restaurants. They're Kiwi cuisine, modern New Zealand cuisine, which is, I don't really know what that is, but it's influenced by experiences that the chefs have had overseas overseas with other cuisine and a lot of the time Japanese food and Asian food and then they use New Zealand ingredients.

8:36They tend to call it modern New Zealand cuisine. So yeah, a lot of our sake is going to restaurants such as that and more and more bottle stores, which is exciting because that means people are drinking sake at home. and that's always been one of our big targets and goals is to make sake mainstream another option for enjoyment at home. Well, I have other questions you're talking about pairing, pairing with New Zealand cuisine, so I have to answer the question now, but I mean, how did the style of your sake evolve over the years? Are you trying, are you aiming at a particular style for this pairing to be successful?

9:23Not really, because, as you know, it's pretty hard to make a sake that covers everything. So instead, we have quite a range of sake, different flavor profiles, aromas, and strengths. We still do our drip press and then our rock press, which gives us two very different finishes. That's the rocks that you were carrying, Mary, right? Yes, that's the bane of my existence. Yeah, we're still using those rocks. We've added a few more, too, when you're ready to come back. Sorry I interrupted you. No, no. Sorry to remind us all, we are only getting older, Dave. We are, but the rocks keep us young. Sure keeps you young.

10:15If we give up on those rocks, then I'm not sure what will happen. So we've got probably a bigger range of sake, now more variety, including we've got sake kasa products as well. And recently we've released a sparkling sake. It's a fruit-infused sparkling sake in a can. So that's... Did you have to buy new equipment to be able to can it? No, luckily we have lots of good craft breweries here. Okay, breweries. And there's a couple very close, and we're already making a sake katsu beer with them. and just the idea of a sparkling sake has always been something and from when you were there Murray we tried I know unsuccessfully a few explosions yes one time we tried our hands at doing a DIY diggement so we like let the bottle almost freeze at the neck and then we try to sort of let the casu float out of the bottle but it just sort of ended up splattering everywhere.

11:34But it was still fun trying. It's fun and still trying and we you know we're doing okay with the secondary fermentation cloudy style sake. All right, you guys have been using them for a while. Yeah and we get we get them out to a few restaurants as well when they want something a bit different but this is a clear, a beautifully clear pear and an apple just locally. In fact, the pears are from my own tree and the apple's from my neighbour's tree and a little bit of honey gets added as well, just to give it a little sweet nose and then it's carbonated so it's not a secondary ferment and then it's canned on the brewery's canning line.

12:23Just a small run. We're doing our second batch right now, and it's gone really well. It's made sake a lot more approachable. A hundred percent, yeah. It's five percent, and then we're getting people to try sake in various ways and easing them and bringing them up to the real thing. but it's changing I think people can enjoy how they want to people do ask how should I do this how should I drink this, should I drink it hot should I drink it cold what should I have it with and it's hard and I don't think we should set any rules we just give them lots of options and hopefully get them to try them and they'll find which one they like and which one goes with the food they like as well.

13:24I mean you mentioned sakekasu, do you know what your clients are doing with the sakekasu? Is it for food like marinades or... Yeah there's a lot of that. Plus beer brewing you mentioned as well. Yes, so the way we can move the most of the sake of cusses is in beer brewing. So we've got two breweries that do that. But most of the sake of cusses we sell is online. So we also have our, let's go back a bit, you asked me before about the proportion of the sales through our brewery sales, maybe 10-15 % and about 10-15 % is online and then we've got wholesale and then we've got local, we look after the local market, I'm the delivery boy for the for all the local restaurants and local customers so that sort of fills up the rest and there's a little bit goes overseas of course.

14:28Of course. But I bet with your newly built cellar door, now that entree consumption is going to increase my leaps and bounds. It was a bit slow, slower than we thought at first, but it's really starting to take off. It's mainly word of mouth. So that's really encouraging. Well it's not too long now before Zenkudo gets put on one of those Queenstown craft brewery hops tours. Hop on hop off. Hop on hop off brewery tours and there you go. Yeah well we'll see about that. But yeah people are using sake for, started off mainly with Japanese, mainly Japanese ladies. making things at home, you know, pickling, marinating, making amazake, things like that.

15:31But now we have plenty of chefs around the country using it. And they're making sauces, ice cream, desserts like cheesecakes and ice creams and whipping it up. We have customers who add a little bit to their smoothie each morning. Each morning? Yeah, it's amazing. People who've been to Japan, they've found out about it, and now they see that it's available in New Zealand. They're experimenting with it.

16:12It keeps us very busy, the sakakusa side of our business. Oh, that's good to hear. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying it's a very profitable business or anything, but it's exciting that people are using, you know, what's, I guess it's a by-product. And, you know, it's a health product, I guess. You know, people are interested in the health benefits and skin. You know, we use it for cosmetics as well. Yeah, that's right. You release cosmetics and soap and... Yeah, there's soap, skin lotion, face mask. Did you get the help of a lab to do that? I guess you did at some point. Not really, no. Not really? Just experimented.

17:02And a couple of other Japanese people outside of the brewery who had been interested in that sort of making soaps and cosmetics. and then when sake cuss became available we got together and got them to try it and it worked and one last usage I read on your website about it is fertilizer for your plum trees because you're producing all this year as well yeah, at the end of the day if there's any left over that's a very good use for it I enjoy that, digging it into the garden and getting it all fermented up and spreading it around. We've actually got some at the brewery now, our own little compost at the back of the brewery.

17:54We've just set out some planter boxes and got a bit of a garden going. We can use it for that right at the brewery as well. So, yeah, we're just trying to make it a little bit more attractive, a nicer destination. We now have a slightly larger tasting room and education room. So we're trying to make it a nicer environment and it includes some plantings. Let's talk about maybe the brew itself and how it changed. I mean, some of the things I remember about Episodes 35 and 36 is you explained that in very early days, you have friends crossing the border with a long raincoat with deep pockets to be able to bring some of your yeast and other things into New Zealand.

18:45But that time was already over, I think, five years ago. But five years ago, if I'm correct, you were not making your own koji, but using imported koji or frozen koji from Japan. And this has changed, hasn't it? So how did it I mean, tell us about that. Yeah, so we're still using Kansal Corgi. Dry, frozen dry. It's kind of like freeze-dried. Freeze-dried Corgi. And it keeps for as long as, you know, a year sort of thing. We don't have to keep it in the fridge. We keep it cool. and at last while its activity kind of slows down a little bit over the year but we find that that's not actually a bad thing.

19:40It just slows the fermentation down whereas when the console corgi is new it's a very active ferment and then we don't want it to be that active. we're trying to proof low temperature 30, 40 days whereas as the korgi ages a little bit it naturally slows down and becomes just right so we're trying to get korgi in and we're using korgi that we've had for maybe a few months or so and it seems to work well and we just go with that now we just go with that, I was already worried about it at first, but I'm finding that the system that we've kind of maybe by accident or we've fallen into, the cycle and everything is working really well.

20:32But we make kōji to keep our, I do a little bit of sake education, have people come in and learn, spend some time with us, with the Sake Asomnius Association based in London. they have a Master of Sake course now and that's really about spending time in a brewery actually making sake so we've had a few students come and stay with us and part of it of course is koji making so I've needed to keep my hand in and I'm making very small batches constantly just created a tiny little koji mura I can control well and make pretty nice korji. And we'll use a little bit of that in our sake. But most of it goes to chefs once again.

21:30They found out that there's... And chefs, even in New Zealand, are making korji. It's completely different to the korji we know. Right, right. It doesn't look like the korji that we use for sake making, but I guess it's doing the same job. But, yeah, I'm making koji, and they're happy to have it all ready to go. Is that something you would be interested in exploring a bit more, like making your own koji for your sake, or are you happy to sort of stick to your freeze-dry koji for the time being? I'm pretty happy with what we've got now. Of course, it would be cool to have a cordy room and do everything in the house.

22:22I've got time as an issue and help. And if we go down the cordy road, there goes my life, which is starting to run out. You're all in your mouth. Yeah. Yeah, so as much as I enjoy it, I think it's a great way for small breweries with limited resources to get going. And that was the intention, but we kind of found our feet with that style of kōji, and it's become our style. It's kind of a clean, soft, gentle style of sake. and obviously a lot of that comes from the koji. So today, to summarize about your sourcing as a business installed in New Zealand, you source your freeze-dried koji from Japan, your yeast still from Japan, I suppose.

23:28What about rice? Yeah, so we've really, despite all these difficulties with rice shortages and prices, and then freight costs, we've stuck to sourcing all our rice at this stage from Japan. I have an order in it at the moment, and it's about to be harvested. And we'll receive that in January next year. So, yeah, we like, one of the reasons we started sake brewing was because we like to do things, you know, we like Japan. We like coming to Japan, dealing with Japanese people, learning about Japan. So we like that contact with Japan. If we sourced our rice from somewhere else, we'd probably lose that.

24:22It's a big part of it. Zenkoro sake is the rice from Japan. including some from Yasuko, my wife's hometown in Fukuoka. In Fukuoka. Yeah. And did you contact farmers directly or did you have to go through Zeno? We... Zeno is a state-owned cooperative. Yeah, it's called Ida Shouji. Okay, so you went through Ida Shouji. So Ida Shouji is kind of our point of contact. they're a trading company that serves sakeburies across the world but mostly in Japan supplying equipment yeah they came to us they came to us I guess when they were just starting starting to you know look for opportunities overseas they came to us very early and introduced the Kouji Kounsel Kouji to us and they brought up quite a few rice samples.

25:28So, yeah, we've been working with them for quite a long time now, I'd say seven years, maybe six years. So, yeah, we're still working with them. And we actually, it's a funny old system, as a lot of things are in Japan, but we have to belong to the Japan Brewers Association in order to be able to purchase the yeast. So we renew that annually. But we still need to go through Ida Shorji in order to purchase it. So, yeah, some things you just have to go with. And that's one funny thing that we just go with. So you mentioned expansion plans very early. So can you tell us a little bit about the expansion of the breweries facilities?

26:25Yeah, we started, we've got a building that's 240 square meters. And when we started we had 100 meters, 100 square meters was our brewery. And that was where we did absolutely everything, including all the brewing and the labeling and the storage. and now we've sort of gradually taken over the whole building so we've got twice as much space as we originally had so what we were able to do is build a big cool room and that's our brewing room so we can we can brew all year around in this in this brewing room no more holidays no there's not many

27:17but that's all right for now yeah so we can brew brew and importantly we can also press the sake in in the cool room that makes a huge difference and that's been a big big step forward is that the sake from from birth until the time it leaves our brewery is basically at five degrees throughout you know for the first six months of its life in the in the morami stage it gets up to 10 degrees maximum but otherwise it's it's cool all the time pasteurized it obviously gets pasteurized and gets a little little warm up for a little bit there but you know you get it straight down and cool storage as well and then our old brewing room has become a cool storage room, we call it the aging room, where we condition the sake for several months before it's blended and then bottled.

28:18And in addition to that, we have a bit more space, so we're not tripping over ourselves all the time. We've been able to use, I'm not sure if you saw, Marie, but we've got sort of like a mezzanine level as well now, so we can get rice and bottles and up off the floor. I remember the attic with the rickety ladder where you had empty boxes. It's still there, but this mezzanine is a new addition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got a couple of mezzanines so we can get stuff off the brewery floor and out of the way and got a little mini lift, like a forklift that you sort of push around so we can get heavy stuff up off the floor and up onto the mezzanine.

29:05That's been a huge step forward as well. We can lift heavier things so we can do slightly bigger batches. We can lift our, we're still only doing, we've got about 500 litres of morami which is a lot more than when you were there. Yeah. So we'll do 230 kgs of total rice per batch now. Mm, okay. Wow. So, yeah, and it's just everything's a bit heavier, but with a lift and a bit more space, we can handle those bigger batches. And then, as I said, we've got two huni now, both on sort of mobile. We can push them around, and we can get them all in the cool room. Wow. Would you say maybe your production has doubled since the time I was there?

30:01It's easily doubled from the sound of it. Not quite double. So what we've done is we've increased our production ability, our capacity, so we can produce a lot more and we're all set up for it, but we're not getting ahead of ourselves. We're still keeping this. We have increased the size of the batches, but we're basically brewing to demand, to meet the demand. But we know that we can do a little bit more. We can keep going, keep growing as demand increases. so it's we know now how to make sake and how much we can make and our task is how do we sell it I think that's really what this year in our 10th anniversary year I've been focusing on with the Oscars on selling and marketing and we have our also with the extra space We've taken over, we have a nice tasting room, a cellar door, so we're starting to advertise it.

31:21We've sort of been hiding, you know, as you know, we've hit away up in our corner of Queenstown until recently. But now we've got a lovely room with all sorts of Japanese decorations and a nice table for tasting. You're sending your sake, I mean, across New Zealand of course, but I saw you when I saw pictures of you in Melbourne as well. So tell us about exports a little and if you have a vision sort of a medium or long term vision Yeah, so it actually involves Marie again, but when we first met I'd say nine years ago at John Gortner's Saku Professional course. And we did that in 2016 and then again in 2017.

32:15Or was it? I think it was. 16 and 17 or 15 and 16? Maybe 15 and 16. Almost a decade ago now. And one of our good friends that we met at the time was Yukino Otsiei of Deja Vu. so she's an owner with her husband, Andrew, of Dejivu sake and Dejivu wine in Australia. And so I think ever since that time, I've been working on Yukino to look after our sake in Australia. but you can know and Andrew being who they are made us put in a bit more work and practice a bit more and finally this year they agreed to become our distributors in Australia so to kick things off we went to the Melbourne Sake Festival and kind of launched our sake in Australia there together with Yukina.

33:27That was, yeah, that's it. What about Japan? What about Japan, other countries? Yeah, well, Japan, we're going back to 2019 Rugby World Cup. We kind of launched then, as you know, and did a collab with Kanahokoto Shuzo in Fukuoka and also Kumazawa Shuzo out in Kanagawa. and then we did a collab soccer for the rugby world cup and that went really well COVID messed things up there and we've been concentrating on rebuilding our market in New Zealand and we thought Japan had enough to do without us around and we did too so we haven't really worked too hard on Japan, but now we are keen to get a little bit back in and we're talking with good mate Wayne Shannon at Rangitoto Tokyo about working together on that.

34:30We're there today by the way. And we happen to be here. So watch this space. Yeah, watch this space. it's great that you're now selling into Australia have you seen any sort of initial movements in the market or is it too soon to tell it's really just set up but just before we came my word from you can know that she sent me a little list of the restaurants that we're now being served in so pretty excited you might be the most successful all black product in Australia making moves across the pond they love us really they love us I mean years of time I'd like to maybe ask you it's a tough question but you've been extremely generous with your time not only with us but I'm thinking about all the people that you received over the years at the brewery, giving them some training.

35:41And you come across as a very patient person as well. And I'd like to ask you simple things like, well, it's a different question, but like some of the hardest or most joyful moments that you had through that journey. And if you have any maybe recommendation for somebody who would want to do that adventure. The recommendations for doing the sake journey is you need to be patient, because things are not going to happen quickly, particularly if you want to be involved with Japan. I think a lot of people who are interested in getting into sake brewing come from beer brewing backgrounds and a lot of those people already know how to brew they know how to look after machinery they're good at using machinery but once they once they start trying to work with Japan they get a little bit impatient you know things take time in Japan and I mean they've been making sake here how long?

37:03How long do we live? 2 ,000 years. 2 ,000 years. We just can't rush things. So that's probably would be my advice. Do you mean that in a way that maybe there are certain bureaucratic procedures and red tape for the lack of a better word and things just kind of move at a different speed than it would otherwise? Yes, that's exactly right. But also in our own markets, so a lot of Japanese restaurants, I'm talking about outside of Japan, and I think people think that, still people think all our customers must be Japanese restaurants. I mean it's really hard to get into a Japanese restaurant even in New Zealand.

38:01They have, especially if it's an owner-chef, they're set in their ways and they have their little systems that are set up and they work really well. And people tend to get a little bit frustrated, I think, about not being able to, why can't we get in to take some of our sake or wine, whatever it is. you just have to be patient and find what works well and focus on that rather than you know try to work up hell right like just go about it as it unfolds or like you know as it works out rather than like have a fixed plan of how you're going to attack a certain market and this is how you're going to do everything yeah but I think it really sort of helps your brand and distinguish itself from the rest and perhaps even find a market segment that would have otherwise not been so interested in consuming sake, right?