OUR STORY
Nova Brewing Co. is a family-owned hybrid craft saké & beer brewery based in Covina, California. The founders James Jin and Emiko Tanabe realized the historical Japanese alcoholic beverage called saké is underappreciated, misunderstood, and underrepresented here in Los Angeles where there’s plenty of beer breweries and wineries. With the booming appreciation for Asian culture and cuisine, they felt the need for a local saké brewery where L.A. locals can come and see, smell, and taste rice being fermented to produce freshly made saké. After apprenticeship in Japan, they took over an old beer brewery in 2019 and turned it into a saké brewery. Because the facility came with beer brewing equipments, they decided to continue brewing beer, but decided to brew beers that is respresentative of their identity and make unique beers made with sake yeast or Asian fruits, teas and spices. We take pride in the effort and the time we put into creating our own original equipment and techniques combined with our training of traditional brewing methods learned in Japan to create our own unique style of saké and beer.
OUR SAKE
Using 100% rice sourced from a farm in North California, our brewer uses hand-crafting techniques learned from an award-winning brewery Inaba Shuzo in Ibaraki, Japan to produce sake that is rich in flavor, bold and higher in acidity than traditional sake to be able to stand up to the variety of food culture in LA.
RICE
A rice variety originating in California and grown since 1948, Calrose is a medium-grain rice and a subspecie of Japonica rice. It’s a strain originally from Japan that seemed to thrive in California climate. We use premium grade of Calrose polished down to 50%. As a sake brewery located in California, we believe using rice with the historical connection to the local region is vital to our identity.
WATER
Calrose rice is grown in Californian soil with Californian water, therefore we strongly believe Californian water has the best chemistry with the rice we use.
KOJI
Arguably the most important ingredient in brewing sake. Koji (scientific name: aspergillus oryzae) plays the role that malt would play in beer, providing enzymes and sugars that yeast needs to ferment and produce alcohol. We built our koji production room from scratch inside our brewery and we use our Calrose rice to produce the koji. Our brewer spent about a year during his homebrewing years with countless fails producing koji in an ice box using hot water container to maintain warm temperature. Due to high quality koji spores are not available in the US, we import the spore from Japan and make our koji in-house.
YEAST
The yeast used for sake is very unique in that in produces high level of esters, thrives in cold temperatures and can produce high amount of alcohol. To honor the rich history of sake yeast strains isolated from historical breweries in Japan and to not derive too much away from the flavors of sake, we decided not to make any substitutes with local yeast. We currently import sake yeast Kyokai #7 and #9 from Japan.
