Sake Bar Yoramu

Sake is normally sold by the 180ml go or by the bottle, which for a visitor is a problem. One and a half measures into the evening you have committed to a single style, you have learned one thing, and you are three-quarters of the way to being unable to taste anything else.

At 60ml a glass, a tasting set of three is roughly a single normal serving in total. You can do three sets across an evening and have tried nine sakes while drinking less than half a bottle. That is the difference between drinking sake and learning what sake is, and it is why this bar is worth a specific journey when most Kyoto bars are not.

The sets are built around a comparison – the same rice at different polishing ratios, the same brewery across years, a warm-served style against a chilled one. You are told what the axis is. It is closer to a tutorial than a bar round, without being solemn.

Yoram Ofer, the owner, is an Israeli who trained in brewing in Japan, and the list reflects somebody who buys against the grain of what the sake market rewards. Expect a great deal of aged sake – koshu, deliberately matured for years, which goes amber and develops flavours closer to sherry or dried fruit than to anything people expect from sake. Expect kimoto and yamahai, the labour-intensive traditional starter methods, which give sourness and body. Expect small breweries nobody exports.

What you should not expect is the light, fruity, highly polished daiginjo that most introductions to sake lead with. That style is well represented everywhere else in Japan and is not what this bar is for. If your only previous sake was a cold fragrant glass in a restaurant, several things poured here will not taste like the same drink, which is the point.

There is food – small dishes, including soba, which the owner also makes – but the bar is not a restaurant and eating properly before you arrive is the sensible plan.

It is small. A counter, a couple of tables, somewhere around ten to twelve people at capacity. On a Friday or Saturday after eight it can be full, and a group of six walking in unannounced is not going to be seated.

Go early in the session, ideally close to 18:00, and go in ones and twos. Explaining that you are there to taste rather than to drink is worth doing; the whole operation is built around people who want to be told what they are drinking, and the conversation is most of the value.

It sits on Nijo-dori in Nakagyo, a few minutes’ walk from Karasuma Oike station and the Manga Museum, which puts it on the other side of the centre from the Kiyamachi bar strip where Bee’s Knees and L’Escamoteur are. It is a destination rather than somewhere you pass. For the brewing end of the same subject, Fushimi is twenty minutes south by train.