After hours gathered around the table, bellies warm and spirits high, I rise and retrieve a slender bottle—amber-hued, mysterious. Into shot-sized cups I pour the elixir, tawny and viscous as syrup, its perfume rising like incense: soy and sherry, caramel and dried fig, maple and aged balsamic. It glides over the tongue, unctuous and silken, unfolding with the slow intensity of something long-forgotten and suddenly remembered.
As the cups are passed, a hush falls. Then, laughter, widened eyes, murmurs of delight. I smile. What you are sipping, I tell them, is not a liqueur, not a dessert wine. It is hon-mirin. True mirin. Brewed with devotion and precision by Daisuke Komatsu, a master of his craft.
To call it a cousin to sake would be technically correct, yet spiritually misleading. Hon-mirin is of the same lineage, but born under a different moon. Sake might be the bold brother, public and proud. Mirin is the sister who holds your gaze a moment longer than expected, who speaks in half-tones and lingers in memory.
When I first met Komatsu-san nearly a decade ago, he had just begun his experiments with mirin. The batch he poured me was not for sale — not yet. It was still becoming. But in the flicker of his eyes and the reverence in his voice, I sensed a resurrection underway. He spoke of mirin’s forgotten history, its role as a prized drink among Edo-era women, its descent into relegation as a mere cooking condiment. He wanted more. He saw more.
Sake may have claimed its place as the national drink centuries ago, but mirin once shared the stage—a refined, sweet spirit cherished for its complexity. The true form, hon-mirin, is almost extinct. And yet, in a small brewery tucked away from time, it is being reborn.
Komatsu-san brews sake, shochu, and mirin with a shared foundation: rice, water, and koji—the sacred mold that conjures sweetness from grain. For mirin, he adds glutinous rice and allows the brew to age, deepening and darkening like wisdom earned in winter. Brewing begins in December. Each morning, great clouds of steam rise from cedar vats as men tend to the rice with quiet rigor. Light streams in from a skylight, illuminating the labor like a blessing.
On my first visit, Komatsu-san opened a wooden door and beckoned me into the koji-muro—the beating heart of any brewery. Few outsiders ever enter. Inside, it was warm and dim, almost womb-like. He scattered dark green spores over steaming rice with the care of a ritualist. This was not performance. This was prayer.
Preservation and revival are his twin devotions. Where others guard their methods, Komatsu-san invites you in. He wants the drinker to see, to understand, to remember. His brewery is one of the smallest in Japan. Everything is done by hand, using inherited tools, wooden tanks, the wisdom of the body.
He tells me he wants to make sake that carries the soul of the past, that holds the essence of how it once was, before stainless steel and automation stripped it of its character.
And so, when the bottle emerges at the end of the night, it is more than a digestif. It is an offering. A return. A quiet act of defiance against haste, against forgetting. We raise our cups, and sip.
An opulent choice, indeed.
