Fushimi sake district

Water. Fushimi sits on an aquifer producing a soft, mineral-light groundwater the brewers call gokosui, and the sake made from it is correspondingly soft and rounded. Nada, near Kobe, has hard water and makes a drier, sharper style – the two are usually described as the masculine and feminine poles of Japanese brewing, which is a cliché that happens to be a reasonable description of the difference in the glass.

The same aquifer is the reason Kyoto makes the tofu it does, and the reason yudofu is a Kyoto dish. It is the single geological fact underlying most of what the city is known for eating and drinking.

Brewing here goes back to the sixteenth century and industrialised in the nineteenth. Around twenty breweries still operate in the district, and it remains a working industrial quarter rather than a preserved one – which is exactly why it is more interesting than a heritage site.

Gekkeikan was founded in 1637 and its museum occupies a nineteenth-century brewery building on the Horikawa canal. The route is self-guided, takes forty minutes to an hour, and covers the tools and the sequence of traditional brewing, with a phone-based guide available over the museum’s free wifi.

It ends at the tasting counter, where over-twenties choose three from about ten sakes that rotate seasonally. Groups are capped at twelve at a time, groups of thirteen or more are not currently accepted, and the museum asks for online advance booking with priority entry at quarter past and quarter to the hour; walk-in slots exist on the hour and half hour when there is space.

There is also a longer guided brewery tour of about eighty minutes into the adjacent working Uchigura brewery, including filling your own 300ml bottle to take away and tasting three undiluted genshu unavailable anywhere else. It runs by reservation.

Anyone driving, cycling, under twenty, pregnant or breastfeeding cannot take the tastings. That is stated plainly and it is the main reason to come by train.

Do not come only for the museum. The canal frontage of white-walled kura warehouses is one of the best streetscapes in the Kyoto area, and in season there are small boats on the Horikawa. The Teradaya inn, where Sakamoto Ryoma was attacked in 1866, is a few minutes away, and Gokonomiya shrine has a spring you can drink from.

Several other breweries run tasting rooms and there are izakaya through the district pouring Fushimi sake with food. The whole thing works best as a late-morning-to-afternoon block, because the museum shuts at 16:30 and the brewery visits are daytime activities.

Which makes it the natural pairing with Fushimi Inari, a few stops north on the same Keihan line and open all night: breweries in the afternoon, shrine after dark, when the gates are lit and empty. For the drinking end of the same subject back in the city, Sake Bar Yoramu pours in 60ml measures four nights a week.