Right next door in Industry City, a small team is brewing junmai sake with some of the cleanest tap water in the country. Spend an afternoon with them and you’ll leave with two things: a handmade oak barrel built stave by stave with your own hands, and a palate for sake you didn’t have when you walked in. Char the inside with a torch, seat the heads, brand it with your initials — then fill it with something Brooklyn Kura hand-picked just for aging.
What You’ll Create
A functional 2-liter oak barrel, coopered from scratch — same craft, same tools, same afternoon of assembling staves and hoops, cutting crozes on the router table, and charring the interior until it’s ready for spirits. This time, what goes in it isn’t whiskey. It’s rice, koji, yeast, and water, aged into something you helped choose.
The Tasting Flight
A sake expert from Brooklyn Kura walks you through a flight of three sakes and a shochu, all brewed or distilled right here in Industry City, all selected because they take well to a little time in wood. The lineup changes with the seasons, but here’s what’s been on the table:
**Grand Prairie — a Junmai Ginjo built around white peach, jasmine, and toasted rice.
**Occidental — a dry-hopped Junmai, bringing out lychee, grapefruit, and cherry that age into deeper dried-fruit notes. Tidal — a fuller-bodied
**Junmai, all steamed rice, apple, and cereal bran.
**Kura Shochu — distilled from the leftover sake lees, rich with fig and custard and a rice umami built for barrel aging.
What Sake and Shochu Actually Are
Brooklyn Kura brews junmai-style sake — no additives, just four ingredients doing all the work. Rice sets the structure; the strain and how far it’s polished shape the flavor before brewing even starts. Koji, the fungus that turns starch to sugar, decides how sweet and umami-forward or light and aromatic the sake ends up. Yeast supplies the fruit, flower, and herb notes, which is why a batch often blends more than one strain. And water — helped along by some of the purest tap water in the country — is what makes the whole thing clean and crisp instead of muddy.
Shochu takes a different road. Where sake is brewed like wine or beer, shochu is distilled like whiskey or vodka. Kura starts with kasu, the leftover lees from sake-making, re-ferments it with a shochu-specific koji, and distills it into something rich and complex — closer to a young rice whiskey than anything else, and exactly the kind of spirit that rewards time in a barrel.
Finishing the Night at Kura
Your barrel’s made, your glass is empty — Brooklyn Kura is a short walk across Industry City, and your Craftsman Ave ticket gets you a discount on sake or shochu to take home and age. They’ve got a full kitchen too: mac and cheese, little smoky sausages, house-made focaccia. Good reason to stay a while longer.
Skill Level : Beginner-friendly, no coopering or sake knowledge required.
What You’ll Be Making : A handmade oak barrel, suitable for aging your own sake or shochu. The barrel will hold approximately 2 liters of liquid.
What You’ll Be Doing: You’ll assemble, shape, char, and personalize your barrel before filling it with a sake or shochu hand-picked by Brooklyn Kura for aging.
What’s Included? All barrel-making materials and tools, guided sake and shochu tasting flight, take your barrel home the same day
