Toko Sake Museum

The city of Yonezawa is known for the quality of its rice and the water which flows down from nearby mountains. Winter is the season when its high-quality sake is brewed in the traditional long-term, low-temperature fermentation process. In the Edo period (1600-1867), rice was very valuable, and so sake would be prohibited whenever there was a rice crop failure. Toko was the one of the few sake breweries which was permitted to continue brewing sake even in these times of famine.