Koyanagi Sake Brewery Bottling House

The despatch building, hemmed in on three sides

Koyanagi Sake Brewery Bottling House (小柳酒造ビン詰場, Koyanagi Shuzō Binzumejō) is a single-storey timber building of 1928 at 903-1 Ogicho, Ogi City, Saga Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 14 February 2002.

It occupies the space east of the Showa West Storehouse, south of the Showa East Storehouse and north of the kettle room. The building runs 10 metres along the ridge and 9 metres across, with a footprint of 77 square metres. The roof is Sangawara-buki pantile on a north-south ridge in Kirizuma-zukuri gabled form, the roof frame uses doubled beams, and the west wall outside is vertically boarded.

A binzumejō is where sake was put into bottles and made ready to leave. Mashing and maturing were finished by then; this is the last stage of the work.

Doubled beams that clear the floor

The structural point of Koyanagi Sake Brewery Bottling House is in the roof. Doubled beams means two tiers of beam, one above the other: short posts stand on the lower beam and carry a second beam above it. Shorter lengths of timber will do, and small sections combined in this way can still reach across a wide span.

Across 9 metres the building brings no post down to the floor. Bottling is work in which benches, people and crates move about the floor, and a post in the middle of that would break the flow. The kettle room on the same site solved the same problem with a King post truss; the bottling house solved it with doubled beams, an extension of the traditional Japanese Wagoya roof. Two buildings from the same year and the same contract chose different framing, and the pair is worth comparing.

Outside there is little to see. Vertical boarding on the west, a gabled pantile roof, and almost no ornament. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the construction plain and then values it as a rare surviving record of the final stage of brewing. Plainness is itself part of the case.

Placed at the end of the sequence

The listing criterion is contribution to the historic landscape of the nation, and the registration number is 41-0036. Koyanagi Sake Brewery Bottling House was completed in 1928 within the improvement scheme begun in 1926.

Its position carries the meaning. The West Storehouse lies to the west, the East Storehouse to the north, the kettle room to the south. The despatch stage sits in the middle of the buildings for mashing, maturing and steaming, at the point from which every store is a short carry. One building demonstrates that the arrangement of this yard follows the order of the work.

Across the thirteen listed structures, nearly every stage from raw material to despatch has a building to match it. Koji is grown in the koji room, rice steamed in the kettle room, the mash held in the two Showa storehouses, and the sake bottled here. Because the last stage survives too, the sequence can be read without a gap.

The west wall is the thing to look at. Its vertical boarding stands close to the sasarago boarding of the West Storehouse and the wide-battened boarding of the East Storehouse, so three ways of cladding a wall can be compared within a few paces. Lift your eyes and the north-south gable ridge is clear.

Visiting

The interior of Koyanagi Sake Brewery Bottling House is closed. It is not opened as a separate attraction, and an ordinary visit gives no chance to see the doubled-beam roof frame.

The west wall is the visible face, seen from the gap beside the West Storehouse. Because buildings press in on three sides, the outline of the whole is hard to grasp; use the direction of the ridge to work out where it ends and the East Storehouse or kettle room begins.

The yard can be entered during the hours of the Ogi Distillery in the converted part of the West Storehouse, 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with irregular closing days, and how far you may walk depends on the day. No photography policy has been published, so ask at reception. Directions and parking are set out on the Koyanagi Sake Brewery page. Details here were checked on 14 September 2026.