The score sheet | Kasumi Club

The whole score sheet

One row per bottle, ranked by blind score. Every figure here is published by the brewery or the importer, or it is left blank.

Every sake Kasumi Club has poured, ranked by blind score out of 5. A dash means the figure is not published by the brewery or the importer, and is left blank rather than estimated.
#	Bottle	Score	Brewery	Region	Class	Rice	Seimai	ABV	SMV	Acid
1	Momokawa Pearl	4.2	SakéOne	Forest Grove, Oregon	Junmai ginjo nigori, undiluted	not published	58%	14.8%	-	-
2	Okunomatsu Tokubetsu Junmai	4.0	Okunomatsu Sake Brewery	Nihonmatsu, Fukushima	Tokubetsu junmai	not published	60%	15%	0	1.4
3	Hananomai Katana, Extra Dry	3.67	Hananomai Brewing Co.	Shizuoka	Junmai ginjo	Shizuoka grown	60%	16%	+7	-
4	Murai Family Tanrei Junmai	3.6	Momokawa Brewing Co.	Oirase, Aomori	Junmai	Masshigura, grown in Aomori	65%	15.5%	+5	-
5	Kurosawa Junmai Kimoto	3.5	Kurosawa Sake Brewery	Yachiho, Nagano	Junmai, kimoto starter	Nagano grown, contract farmed, polished in house	65%	15%	+3	1.7
6	Hatsumago	2.0	Tohoku Meijo	Sakata, Yamagata	Junmai, kimoto starter	Miyama Nishiki	60%	15.5%	+3	1.5

Also available as scores.csv, free to reuse with attribution to Kasumi Club.

How to read these numbers

Five terms cover almost everything on this page and almost everything on a back label. There is a fuller glossary of sake terms too.

Blind score: Out of 5, overall impression, averaged across the members present. Nobody in the room knew the brewery, the price or the country while they scored.
Seimaibuai: How much of each rice grain is left after polishing. 60% means 40% of the grain was milled away. Lower numbers mean more milling, which usually means a cleaner and more aromatic sake, and a more expensive one.
SMV: Sake meter value. Zero is the middle of the scale, negative runs sweet and positive runs dry. A +7 is firmly dry. It measures density rather than taste, so treat it as a direction and not a verdict.
Acidity: Usually between 1.0 and 2.0. Higher acidity carries food better and makes a sweeter sake taste drier than its SMV suggests.
Junmai: Rice, water, koji and yeast, with no distilled alcohol added. Ginjo and daiginjo sit on top of that and describe milling and a longer, colder ferment.

Flight one. June 12, 2026.

Six bottles, poured in the order below, labels in a bag. Scored out of 5 on overall impression by the members present. Glover Park, Washington, D.C.

Six sake bottles lined up on a kitchen counter before the June 12 blind tasting

Momokawa Pearl

Creamy Junmai Ginjo Nigori Genshu · SakéOne · Forest Grove, Oregon

4.2out of 5

What the room saidIt won on overall impression, and it was not close. It also finished ahead of a kimoto from Nagano made by a four week starter method that only about one in ten Japanese breweries still uses. Nobody knew any of that while they were scoring. If the labels had been showing, it is hard to believe an Oregon nigori takes first place.

Okunomatsu Tokubetsu Junmai

Tokubetsu Junmai · Okunomatsu Sake Brewery · Nihonmatsu, Fukushima

4.0out of 5

What the room saidSecond place, and the score that was closest to the winner. The brewery describes it as a mellow aroma with a deep richness, and says it takes gentle warming well, which is a note worth acting on. Very few junmai are recommended warm by the people who made them.

Hananomai Katana, Extra Dry

Junmai Ginjo · Hananomai Brewing Co. · Shizuoka

3.67out of 5

What the room saidThird. Extra dry sake divides a table in a way sweeter styles do not, and this is the bottle people either put near the top of their card or near the bottom, with very little in between. The average lands mid table because of it, which is a good argument for reading the spread and not only the mean.

Murai Family Tanrei Junmai

Junmai · Momokawa Brewing Co. · Oirase, Aomori

3.6out of 5

What the room saidFourth, in a tight cluster with third and fifth. Elegant and dry, with melon and apple on the nose, is how the importer puts it, and that reads as a fair description of a bottle that nobody disliked and nobody fought for.

Kurosawa Junmai Kimoto

Junmai, kimoto starter · Kurosawa Sake Brewery · Yachiho, Nagano

3.5out of 5

What the room saidFifth of six, and this is the score worth arguing about. Kimoto sake is rustic on purpose. Skurnik's note is black walnuts and cacao nibs, which is not what most people expect a glass of sake to taste like, and a blind pour punishes anything unfamiliar. The serving instruction matters more here than the score does. Cold it reads lean and acidic, and warmed past 100°F it turns sweet and chocolatey. We poured it cold. That may be the whole story of its fifth place.

Hatsumago

Junmai, kimoto starter · Tohoku Meijo · Sakata, Yamagata

2.0out of 5

What the room saidLast, at 2.0, which was the largest gap of the night. Two things are worth saying about that. The first is that this was the second kimoto in the flight, and both kimoto bottles finished at the bottom, which says more about a cold blind pour than it does about either brewery. The second is that Hatsumago is versatile across temperature and we served it one way. It deserves a second pour, warm, before anybody concludes anything.

How the scoring works

Labels go in a bag before anybody arrives, and the bottles are poured in a fixed order. Everyone scores what is in the glass on overall impression, complexity, aroma and mouth feel. The overall number is the one published here. A first-night member's score counts the same as anyone else's.

One night is one night. A bottle has to hold up across more than one tasting before it becomes a standing order, and two of the scores above are already disputed inside the club for reasons written on the bottle pages.

Specs we could not confirm against a brewery or an importer are left off rather than guessed at, which is why some rows are shorter than others.

The ones we hear most

How does Kasumi Club score sake?

Labels go into a bag before anybody arrives and the bottles are poured in a fixed order. Everyone present scores what is in the glass out of 5 on overall impression, and the published figure is the mean. A first-night member's score counts the same as anyone else's.

How many bottles has Kasumi Club scored?

Six bottles across one tasting, held in Glover Park, Washington, D.C. on June 12, 2026.

Which sake scored highest?

Momokawa Pearl, a junmai ginjo nigori genshu brewed by SakeOne in Forest Grove, Oregon, at 4.2 out of 5. It beat four Japanese breweries in a blind pour.

Can I download the Kasumi Club scores?

Yes. The full score sheet is published as a CSV at https://kasumiclub.com/sake/scores.csv and is free to reuse with attribution.

Does Kasumi Club sell sake?

No. Kasumi Club is an informal buying group, not a licensed retailer. Group orders are placed through a licensed retailer with money collected from members in advance.

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