A vast collection of Crocs, variously sized and colored, lines the entrance to Sequoia Sake. When you enter the warehouse brewery, located on Apparel Way in the Bayview, you’re meant to remove your shoes and select a pair of the foam clogs to wear inside the brewery. Fashion objections will not be entertained. “It’s for the yeast,” explains Sequoia co-owner Jake Myrick, Croc-donning himself.

Sake yeast is weak — and Myrick, who has been brewing here since early 2015, leaves no room for bacterial error. Perhaps more than beer brewing or winemaking, sake brewing requires an extraordinary level of environmental precision. So it is at Myrick’s facility: spotless, serene and partitioned into areas where street shoes (and in the case of one room, street clothes) are prohibited. Microbicidal hospital paint coats the walls.

Not only is Sequoia the sole sake brewery in the city of San Francisco, but it is one of just a handful of sake microbreweries in North America.

Sequoia’s signature is nama, or unpasteurized sake. It literally means “raw” — Myrick likes to call it “live.”

“Nama has all the potential of what sake can be,” says Myrick, who co-owns Sequoia with his wife, Noriko Kamei, and business partner, Warren Pfahl. “It has the biggest possibility for flavor.” As with milk and cheese, unpasteurized sake doesn’t have a long shelf life and needs to stay refrigerated. So Myrick’s vision, for now, is a local one. The furthest he’ll distribute (and he does all the distributing himself, so as to maintain control of temperature) is San Jose.

Back to Gallery The search for American craft sake leads to the Bayview 16 1 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 2 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 3 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 4 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 5 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 6 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 7 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 8 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 9 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 10 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 11 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 12 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 13 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 14 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 15 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 16 of 16 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle































It’s not exactly a business model with wild scalability. Indeed, a man doesn’t bet his livelihood on such an expensive, labor-intensive and — to most American drinkers — misunderstood product category unless he has a fire in his belly.

Myrick does.

“Jake is what I’ve been waiting for,” says Beau Timken, owner of the Hayes Valley shop True Sake. “He’s got the skills, he’s got the motivation, but most importantly he’s got the passion.”

Myrick began as an enthusiastic consumer and home brewer — of beer. First exposed to sake as a student at Osaka University in the 1980s, he had a long career in tech in the U.S. before moving back to Japan in 2001 with Noriko and their daughter, Olivia. It was then, while still working in tech, that he became obsessed with sake. He visited hundreds of breweries in Japan, developing a love for nama.

The Rice Issue

No matter your background, rice is likely an indelible part of your childhood food memories, and a constant part of your present day. In California, innumerable people depend on rice. Read some of those people's stories — and their recipes.

Returning stateside afterward brought disappointment. “I couldn’t get the kind of sake I wanted in the U.S.,” Myrick say s.

American sake has never truly taken off. For much of the 20th century, it was imported by Japanese food companies merely as a sushi-restaurant afterthought, alongside chopsticks and nori. Although San Francisco saw at least six sake breweries open in the years following Prohibition, all had closed by the time World War II began.

Even in Japan, sake lately has suffered from image problems. It’s your grandpa’s drink. And because it’s regulated by the government, becoming a sake brewer — which requires long apprenticeships — can be a 20-year endeavor. Young people aren’t becoming brewers. In fact, they’re not even becoming drinkers: There were about 1,000 fewer sake breweries in Japan in 2015 than in 1985.

Today, four of this country’s largest sake breweries are in California, all Japanese-owned: Gekkeikan in Folsom (Sacramento County); Takara in Berkeley; Ozeki in Hollister (San Benito County); and Yaegaki near Los Angeles. Many of them came here decades ago in search of cheaper rice. A tradition of American-owned sake breweries never emerged. Until, maybe, now.

It’s not hard to understand why Myrick’s mission — local, small-batch, craft — has found its rightful home in San Francisco. “The beer revolution has helped us,” he says. Like Timken, Myrick views himself as a sake proselytizer: He hosts chef dinners, pairing classes with Dandelion Chocolate and company team-building events at the brewery. He welcomes visitors for tastings on weekends (fee: $10). In the month of May, 140 customers visited Sequoia. “We think that kind of education is what San Francisco is all about,” Myrick says.

The meticulousness required for sake production gives “craft” new meaning. At Sequoia, the entire process takes about 45 days: first, three to four days to cultivate the koji mold. It’s done in a dedicated room, which must stay at a completely stable temperature and must remain impossibly free of outside microbiota. (Myrick changes his clothing before entering.) The yeast takes about seven to 10 days to propagate; fermentation, another 20 days; clarification in bottle, about two more weeks. When making the prized daiginjo, which requires polishing away more than half of the outer rice grain, Myrick sleeps on a cot at the brewery so that he can massage the mash every eight hours. Each bottle requires about a pound of rice. (Myrick and Noriko’s daughter, now 20 years old, is apprenticing with sake brewers around the world to learn the craft.)

All Sequoia sake is junmai, literally “pure rice”: The only ingredients are rice, water, yeast and koji. The sole byproduct is the lees pressed off after fermentation, known as sake kasu, which happen to be a superfood. (Some Japanese breweries make about 30 percent of their revenue by selling their sake kasu; it can be used in food preparations, and there’s even a cosmetics line, SK-II, based on it. Find Sequoia’s sake kasu in dishes at Ichido in Dogpatch.)

Perhaps Myrick’s greatest challenge is the quality of rice available here. California doesn’t grow premium sake rice; varieties like Yamada-Nishiki, which grow over 6 feet tall, can’t withstand our winds. While some California breweries buy Yamada-Nishiki from Arkansas, Myrick likes using local ingredients.

Our local variety is called Calrose, grown in the Sacramento Valley. But “Calrose is not a perfect brewing rice,” says Timken. “It has no shimpaku (starchy core). We’re waiting for better raw materials.” Myrick, however, is Calrose-positive: He sent samples to a lab in Japan last year, which found the rice to have a more substantial starch center than he’d thought. (In about two months, however, he will release his first daiginjo made with Arkansas Yamada-Nishiki.)

San Francisco is one of the largest sake markets in the United States, behind New York and Los Angeles, and 13 Bay Area restaurants and 12 retail shops now carry Sequoia Sake, including Rintaro, Hakkasan and Liholiho Yacht Club. Still, sake evangelists like Myrick and Timken have a lot of work to do in introducing Americans to the pleasures of sake.

“My goal is for people to take bottles of sake and put it on their dinner table where they have that bottle of wine,” Timken says.

Myrick’s working on that. That’s why he bottles his sake in wine-size 375- and 750-ml wine bottles, as opposed to the standard 720-ml: “We want you to bring a bottle to a party and people will drink it before they realize it’s not wine,” he smiles. Once they get a taste of nama, they may never look back.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine, beer and spirits writer. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob