Anybody who has gone looking for good sake in Washington has had the same evening. The shelf is four bottles wide, three of them are the same thing at different sizes, and the one interesting bottle has been sitting under a fluorescent light for eleven months. Meanwhile a friend in New York is drinking something unpasteurized from a brewery you have never heard of. The reason is structural and it is worth understanding.
Everything moves through three tiers
Alcohol in the United States moves through three tiers. A producer sells to a distributor, the distributor sells to a retailer, and only the retailer sells to you. Nobody is allowed to skip a step. The system dates to the end of Prohibition and it was designed to stop producers from controlling the shops that sold their product.
What that means in practice is that a brewery in Yamagata cannot put a case on a plane to a shop in Georgetown, however much both of them want it, until a licensed distributor in the middle agrees to carry it.
The middle tier is where the sake goes missing
A distributor makes its money on volume and predictability, so it stocks what moves. For a category the size of sake in a market the size of D.C., that means the safe middle, which is the part that survives being warm for a week and sitting on a shelf for a year.
Everything interesting about sake is the opposite of that. Unpasteurized sake needs a cold chain from the brewery to your fridge. Undiluted sake is expensive per bottle and sells slowly because the price scares people. Seasonal releases are gone in two months, which is not long enough to build a sales sheet around. None of that is worth a distributor's attention for one city unless somebody guarantees the volume up front.
So the good stuff goes where the guaranteed volume already is, which is restaurants in New York and Los Angeles that will commit to a case before it lands. What is left for a D.C. shelf is whatever a distributor is confident it can sell to everybody.
A case is the number that changes the answer
The unit that changes a brewery's mind is a case, usually twelve bottles. A case is small enough that one person cannot sensibly commit to it and large enough that the people upstream will take the call.
About a hundred of us on one list is a case, several times over. There is nothing clever about it. Being the number that makes a yes possible is the entire mechanism.
What it looks like from the inside is this. A bottle wins a blind tasting, we work out what it takes to get a case of it into the city, and then everybody hears how many bottles are going and can say how many they want. Money goes in before anything is ordered. If not enough people want it, it does not happen and nobody is out anything.
Two things this does not fix
Plenty of what we pour is available in D.C. if you know to ask for it, and some of the best-scoring bottles have been. The score sheet is honest about which ones. A club is a way to find out what is worth chasing as much as it is a way to get hold of it.
The other thing is that pooling an order does not make anyone an expert. That comes from tasting six things without knowing what any of them are and arguing about them with twenty other people, which is a separate exercise and the one most members say they came back for.
Written for Kasumi Club, a sake tasting and buying club in Washington, D.C. Every bottle we have poured, with its blind score and full specifications, is on the score sheet.
Send us a bottle and about twenty people will tell you the truth.
Kasumi Club pours everything blind. Breweries and importers use us to test the D.C. market, and every bottle we pour gets a page with its score, whether it wins or not.
How it works for breweries