Kayashima Sake Brewery Former Muromae

What the Kayashima Sake Brewery Former Muromae is

The Kayashima Sake Brewery Former Muromae (萱島酒造旧ムロマエ, Kayashima Shuzō Kyū-muromae) is a single-storey plastered storehouse-type building from 1894 at Kayashima Sake Brewery in Tsunai, Kunisaki City, Oita Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on January 16, 1998. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 79 m².

Muromae means "in front of the muro," the Kojimuro or koji room. According to the official description, the Kayashima Former Muromae was where koji was cooled. Koji comes out of its warm, humid room too hot to use straight away, and a brewery needs somewhere to bring it down before the next stage. This was that place.

Among the oldest buildings on the site

The official description calls the Former Muromae the oldest building in the brewery and a valuable record of its history. It was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

The Cold Storehouse (Former Brewhouse), also dated 1894, is described as the oldest building too, and the database gives no way to tell which came first. The fair reading is that the Kayashima Sake Brewery Former Muromae is one of the two earliest survivors of a brewery founded in 1873.

Twenty years after it was built, between 1914 and 1916, the brewery added the brewing storehouse, the Nakagura, the chimney and the rice storehouse in quick succession. The Former Muromae is one of the few buildings left from before that expansion.

A traditional roof frame and plastered walls

The Kayashima Former Muromae measures 5 by 4.5 ken; taking 1 ken as about 1.8 meters, that is roughly 9.1 by 8.2 meters, close to square. It stands on the south side of the site with its ridge at right angles to the long Nakagura.

Its roof is carried on a Wagoya, the Japanese frame of posts set on beams. The brewing storehouse of 1914 and the Nakagura of 1915, by contrast, are framed with trusses according to their official descriptions. On one plot, the Meiji building uses the native system and the big Taisho storehouses use the imported one.

The walls are finished in Shikkui lime plaster. The octagonal brick chimney stands directly against its north side, and the Former Koji Room of 1915 lies to its south. The room where koji was grown and the room where it was cooled sit side by side, so the order of koji-making can be traced on the ground.

Seeing the Kayashima Sake Brewery Former Muromae

The Kayashima Sake Brewery Former Muromae stands within the working brewery toward the south of the site, and its interior is closed. Ask at SAKE GALLERY Tohzai or call the brewery (+81-978-72-1181) about viewing the exterior.

If you do see it, take it in together with the chimney at its north side: a low plastered Meiji building with an octagonal brick shaft of 1914 rising right beside it.