Junmai Daiginjou Migaki Niwari Sanbu 23 (720 ml)

When a competitor reached 24% seimaibuai, Hiroshi Sakurai extended Dassai's milling run a final 24 hours to land at 23% — a deliberate act of escalation that required 168 continuous hours of polishing per batch and effectively redrew the upper boundary of ultra-premium sake.

That decision is now baked into every bottle of Dassai 23. The brewery sits deep in a mountain valley in Shuto-cho, Iwakuni City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, where the regional water is classified Seiryu — very soft, low-mineral clear-stream water, purified further on-site — a source that amplifies the delicacy extracted by extreme milling rather than masking it with mineral weight.

100% Yamada Nishiki rice is washed in 10 kg units under running water, soaked approximately 15 minutes, and fermented in small individual tanks with handmade koji applied manually — no automation at the koji stage. Sake is separated from the mash via centrifuge, a technique Dassai pioneered commercially in Japan, extracting liquid without pressure and preserving the most volatile aromatic compounds intact.

Pasteurization follows the proprietary Hayata method (Patent 2013-008455): bottled cold below 5°C, hot-water-shower pasteurized, then rapid-cooled — a sequence engineered to lock in freshness rather than cook it away. Dassai produces exclusively Junmai Daiginjo across its entire commercial range, a single-tier commitment with no parallel in large-scale Japanese brewing.

Brewed year-round by permanent staff rather than seasonal toji, the 23 is intended for near-term consumption to preserve the aromatic lift that 77% milling makes possible.