NV Boken Ringo Junmai Ginjo Kochi (720 mL) 720 ml

Kochi Prefecture sits on the southern edge of Shikoku Island, facing the Pacific Ocean with nothing between it and the open sea. It is the most typhoon-prone region in Japan, and the weather shows in everything the land produces—including the rice.

Because Kochi is battered by rainfall and wind in ways that most of Japan is not, the rice grown there develops smaller grains than the varieties used almost everywhere else in the country. Smaller grains mean a higher concentration of the starchy core that drives the finest sake. It is a quirk of geography that has shaped the character of Kochi brewing for generations, producing sake with a clarity and focus that is difficult to replicate anywhere else.

Takagi Shuzo has been working with that rice since 1884, when the Takagi family began brewing in Akaoka, a merchant town on Kochi’s coastline. The brewery has survived war, economic upheaval, and the slow contraction of Japan’s sake industry, and today it is led by Ippo Takagi, the sixth-generation brewer, who has built his vision around what he calls the “Tosa Experience Sake.” The concept is straightforward: Kochi’s ingredients—its rice, its water, its singular yeasts—are capable of producing something that no other place in Japan can replicate. Ippo has committed himself to proving it.

The yeast at the center of that argument is Cel-24, developed by the Kochi Prefectural Industrial Technology Center and licensed exclusively to breweries within the prefecture. It produces an aromatic profile of remarkable expressiveness—green apple, ripe citrus, fresh herbs—while maintaining the kind of focused acidity that keeps everything in balance. You cannot brew with Cel-24 outside of Kochi. It is, in the most literal sense, a taste of place.

Boken Ringo is the expression of all of that—a Junmai Ginjo of precision, depth, and genuine distinction, brewed by Takagi Shuzo for Boken, a brand dedicated to bringing the finest legacy breweries in Japan to a wider audience.