6 Best Sakes to Drink: Top-Quality Sake Brands for Bars

More than ever, customers demand freshness, flexibility, and full-flavor from drinks and dining.

Bars and restaurants seeking to elevate, enrich, or easily slide into the customer dining experience try Japanese sake—its national drink of increasing popularity. Selecting the right sake from a diverse and growing selection of quality brands with unique appeal for various customer tastes, expectations, and wallets. 

Luxury wine bars, casual restaurants, and the budget-friendly chain segment their customer base, and should divide the best sakes according to which rice wine brands support sales optimization. 

Explore this list of the best sakes matching average check size, restaurant sales type, and price per bottle for optimal appeal. Choose your sake brand for more delight and an optimal return for your investment in these wine trends.

Key Takeaway: The best sake brands for a bar or restaurant depend on their alignment with the perfect customer persona: high-cost glasses fit the luxe bar, and lower-quality brews suited for casual spots.

Best Sake for Luxury Bars & Restaurants

Premium bars require outstanding sake grades. Brands in this category should showcase the upper-most profile of artistry, tradition, and drinking experience. As a class, the luxury sake brew represents high-caliber craftsmanship and a meticulous, unyielding approach to production processes. 

The best sakes available, these wines are ideal for the upscale establishment who aims to impress high-earning clientele with even higher expectations for quality in the dining or drinking experience.

Daissai 23

This noteworthy and highly trusted junmai is made from a particular variety of rice: Yamadanishiki polished by as little as 23%. 

Honey-like in its taste and gently fruity in aroma, this wine has a remarkably clean finish. High-end sushi is, for example, one of its more ideal pairings. 

Daishichi Junmai

Polished up to 50%, this wine is also produced with the special, Yamadanishiki rice. It presents with notes of peach, melon, and raisin. 

Velvety in its texture, this rice wine is perfect for the premium seafood recipe with oysters, fish, and lobster. 

Good Sake Brands for Casual Dining

In the casual restaurant or laid-back bar, sake should stay approachable rather than high-brow and inaccessibly foreign. While not the most refined, these approachable sake brands create excellent rice wine for drinking. 

These traditional and sparkling sake types can be a smart choice for customers unfamiliar with the wine—sometimes trying sake (or soju) for the first time—as well as more seasoned drinkers who want an acceptable standard to ease into a casual meal. 

Hakkaisan Tokubetsu 

A valuable addition to the wine program list, this honjozo classic is prepared from rice polished a little more than 50%, approaching the cusp of its higher-grade Daiginjo family. 

In taste, the wine offers a smooth and very mellow enjoyment which matches nicely with buttery meals with umami depth such as steaks and marinated chicken. 

Kikusui Ginjo

Kikusui is an organic wine that’s loved for its drops of honeydew and banana flavor. The brew is dry and crisp, so it works beautifully with fresh cheese plates, steamed appetizers, and a light lunch. 

Best Sake to Drink on a Budget

Premium pricetags, despite the wine’s trending reputation, are not a requirement when drinking sake. Highly decent sake can be found for any bar or restaurant willing to buy the right inventory—low-cost or not. 

More than this, Japan’s sake rice wine embodies responsive flexibility by appearing with variation in its taste, sake alcohol content, and price per bottle. 

Gekkaikan

Though the wine is considered “everyday,” it’s a sake that carries many wonderful herbaceous associations. The wine’s flavor is earthy and has a finish close to grapefruit, ready to pair with salty fare or for a citrusy, mixed sake cocktail. 

Kokuryu

Rich and full-bodied, this sake brings a roasted aroma and notes of chocolate or caramel. Though its flavor is subtle, the sake is a positive match for hearty, popular foods with fiery spices and bite. 

Finding the Best Sakes for Customer Segments

The hospitality industry can divide customer groups by any demographic that reveals a way to optimize sales, ensure satisfaction, and successfully promote.

For sake, this means assessing the preferred flavors, price per glass, and any painful hesitations about, possible, trying fermented varieties of wine. You may also have an initial sense of your client’s wine familiarity and personal preferences, in order to market this imported wine trend.

Rather than look at the dilemma bottle to bottle and brand to brand, ground your selection in possible spend and dining behavior from the beginning. While strategies can be more specific in catering to customers by average age, time of day, or preferred entrees—cost is a first-line decision factor.

Choosing wisely here can open up more specific refinements for food pairings and high-traffic weekends as patterns emerge.

Frequently Asked Questions for Sake Drink Brands

What four grades of sake brands describe their wine’s quality?

Ginjo, Daiginjo, Junmai and Honjozo are the four grades Japan uses to define sake brand’s wine quality.

These distinct classifications of Japanese sake can help bar alcohol suppliers and restaurant beverage management determine the best sakes for their menu:

• Daiginjo: Highest-grade of sake made with polished rice (down to less than 50% of the original grain) to create the lightest flavor and refined body.
• Ginjo: Premium-grade sake that uses polished rice (to 60% or less than the starting grain) for a bright and airy brew of fruit-forward flavors.
• Junmai: A popular, casual, and standard-range for sake quality describing its purity—made only from rice, water, yeast, and koji molds with no additives. 
• Honjozo: Technically impure blend of sake fortified using distilled alcohol (up to 10% of its total volume) and polished rice (less than 70% of the grain) fermentation.

How is lower-quality sake different from luxury sake?

Grain polish levels decide the quality category of sake brands. High-end sake is less than 40% polished. The lowest-quality brews can be as much as 70% reduced. 

Beside rice polish, added alcohol, flavoring, or preservatives establish its grade, showing its production standards after fermentation. Pure and unpolluted sake achieves higher esteem in contrast to compromises found in cooking sake, which helps the sake not go bad. 

What is the highest-quality sake made for drinking?

Daiginjo is the most premium, highest-quality sake on the market. Not surprisingly, it is remarkably delicate for brewers to learn how to make sake wine of this caliber.

Compared to its high bar for purity, ingredients, and production—Ginjo is high-grade. Junmai is a mid-range standard for casual drinks.

Which sake brands are popular at bars?

Daissai 45, Hakkaisan, and Kikusi are well-established, high-rated brands because of their long-standing popularity and mid-range quality within the range of sake grades. 

Many more brands trend in US markets because of their colorful approach to branding and personable messaging, especially among lower-quality, easy-entry sake types.