Yohichi Yugeta wants you to think about soy sauce the way you think about wine. Not the price or the prestige but the idea that a bottle can taste of a specific place, a specific set of hands, a specific stretch of time. Grape variety, soil, climate, vintage: a wine carries all of it. Yugeta insists his soy sauce does too and he’s built a 103-year-old brewery around proving it.
Which leads to a puzzle. Yugeta Shoyu makes two sauces that share a building, a water source, and a philosophy, then land in completely different places at the table. One is a certified-organic sauce aged a single year, meant for a dish of sashimi. The other is double-brewed, aged twice as long, dark enough to look aggressive and just sweet enough to finish a scoop of ice cream. Set them side by side and they seem to disagree with each other. Look at how they’re made and they’re making the exact same argument.
The brewery behind both bottles
A worker stirs moromi — the fermenting mash of koji, salt and water — in the Sakado brewing hall. Both sauces begin here before they part ways.
Yugeta Shoyu sits in Sakado, in Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo, and has been brewing since 1923. It draws its water from groundwater running off the Chichibu mountain range, pulled from roughly 80 meters underground. Fourth-generation president Yohichi Yugeta runs the place on a family motto he translates as “dress the business in a haori“, the formal coat worn over a kimono. He reads it as a rule about integrity: no falsehoods in the product, nothing sold that a customer can’t trust.
Two decisions flow from that, and neither is convenient. First, Yugeta uses whole soybeans and wheat grown in Japan instead of the imported crops that supply most of the industry. Second, it ferments in kioke, the wooden barrels behind only about 1% of Japan’s soy sauce. Wood is harder than steel. The barrels need more upkeep, hold less, and can’t be temperature-controlled. Yugeta treats both choices as settled anyway. To mark its centennial, the brewery went further and commissioned a new barrel built from local cedar, made with help from staff and customers, betting that someone will still be brewing this way in another hundred years.
A little vocabulary makes the rest go down easier. Koji is the mold-inoculated grain that starts fermentation. Moromi is the mash of koji, salt, and liquid that slowly turns into soy sauce. Koikuchi is the standard dark style, built from roughly equal soybeans and wheat, what most people picture when they hear “soy sauce.” Saishikomi, or double-brewed, is the outlier the second bottle belongs to. Both sauces begin the same way, in the same wood. Then they part.
At a Glance: Yugeta Organic Soy Sauce
| Characteristic | Yugeta Organic Soy Sauce |
| Brewing Method | Naturally brewed |
| Aging Duration | 1 year |
| Fermentation Vessel | Kioke wooden barrels |
| Soybean:Wheat Ratio | 55:45 |
| Ingredient Quality | Certified organic, Japanese-grown whole soybeans and wheat; sun-dried salt from Mexico |
| Amino Acid Nitrogen | 1.6 g/100mL |
| Primary Taste Profile | Rich, rounded umami |
| Aroma Profile | Savory, appetizing |
| Regional Style | Koikuchi (organic) |
| Recommended Uses | Sashimi, sushi, chilled tofu, simply cooked vegetables; seasoning for stewed or grilled meat and fish |
| Salt-Free Solids | 21 g/100mL |
| Koji Cultivation Time | ~46 hours |
| Production Volume | 146,000 liters/year |
| Certifications | FSSC 22000 |
Organic is not the whole story
Yugeta Organic Soy Sauce, a koikuchi aged about a year from certified-organic soybeans and wheat grown in Japan.
The organic sauce is a koikuchi; soybeans and wheat close to even, naturally brewed, aged about a year in wood. Its koji cultivates for roughly 46 hours. The soybeans and wheat are certified organic and grown in Japan; the salt is sun-dried salt from Mexico; the water is the Chichibu groundwater. The number worth knowing is its amino acid nitrogen: 1.6 grams per 100 milliliters. That figure tracks the umami-bearing amino acids fermentation produces as it breaks down soybean protein…the higher it climbs, the more developed the umami.
But the label word Yugeta most wants to complicate is the one on the front. To him, “organic” alone tells you almost nothing.
“What people most often underestimate about our organic soy sauce is that organic certification alone does not define its quality,” he says. “Where and how the ingredients are grown also matter.”
So he refuses the obvious shortcut. Imported organic soybeans and wheat are far easier to buy in the volumes a brewery needs. Japanese-grown organic crops are produced in tiny quantities, which makes them slow and costly to secure. Yugeta buys them anyway, because the point of the sauce isn’t to be organic in the abstract, it’s to taste of Japanese-grown ingredients in particular.
That’s why he tells newcomers to keep it plain. A few drops on chilled tofu, a dish of it beside sashimi, or a splash over simply cooked vegetables. Its balanced salinity and long, savory finish come through clearly on their own. Bury it in a complicated recipe and you’ve paid a premium for an origin you can no longer taste.
At a Glance: Yugeta Double Brewed Soy Sauce
| Characteristic | Yugeta Double Brewed Soy Sauce |
| Brewing Method | Naturally brewed |
| Aging Duration | 2 years |
| Fermentation Vessel | Kioke wooden barrels |
| Soybean:Wheat Ratio | 55:45 |
| Ingredient Quality | Whole soybeans and wheat grown in Saitama Prefecture; sun-dried salt from Mexico |
| Amino Acid Nitrogen | 1.92 g/100mL |
| Primary Taste Profile | Heavy umami, low salt, faintly sweet |
| Aroma Profile | Savory, appetizing |
| Regional Style | Saishikomi (double-brewed) |
| Recommended Uses | Steak with wasabi, grilled mochi, drizzled over ice cream |
| Salt-Free Solids | 24 g/100mL |
| Koji Cultivation Time | ~46 hours |
| Production Volume | 9,800 liters/year |
| Certifications | FSSC 22000 |
What the second brew does
Yugeta Double Brewed Soy Sauce, a saishikomi aged about two years. Finished soy sauce stands in for the usual brine, leaving less salt and a faint sweetness despite the dark color.
The double-brewed sauce looks like the organic one’s opposite, and the name explains why. A standard koikuchi mixes its koji with saltwater brine. A saishikomi leaves the brine out entirely and uses already-finished soy sauce in its place, then ferments that richer mash a second time. Yugeta ages this one about two years, twice as long as the organic. Saishikomi is a rare thing to make: koikuchi accounts for roughly 80% of Japan’s soy sauce, which leaves double-brewed among the smallest of the five styles recognized under the Japanese Agricultural Standard.
The sauce is dark, so people read it as salty and sharp. It’s neither.
“Due to its dark color, double-brewed soy sauce may look salty, but it is actually not overly salty,” Yugeta says. Swap finished soy sauce in for the brine, and you end up with less salt, not more; the heavy umami then tips the whole thing toward a faint sweetness. The extra year shows up in the numbers, too. Amino acid nitrogen climbs to 1.92 grams per 100 milliliters and salt-free solids reach 24 grams, both above the organic sauce.
There’s a tidy symmetry in the sourcing. Where the organic sauce reaches across Japan for certified-organic crops, the double-brewed one stays home: its soybeans and wheat are grown in Saitama. Yugeta chalks that up to chemistry as much as loyalty. Beans and yeasts raised in the same climate, he figures, simply ferment well together.
The uses run the other way, too. Yugeta points to steak with a little wasabi, or the sauce spooned over grilled mochi. Then there’s ice cream, where two years of fermentation reads as caramel, a pairing his brewery has committed to enough to document how soy sauce ice cream gets made. It sounds like a stunt until you taste what long fermentation does to sweetness. Then it just sounds like a finishing sauce.
Why it has to be wood
Kioke, the cedar barrels that hold each brewery’s resident yeasts and lactic acid bacteria — the source, Yugeta says, of flavors a steel tank can’t copy.
Here’s where the two sauces stop disagreeing. Neither gets its character from an additive or a stainless tank. Both come out of the same wooden barrels, and Yugeta treats those barrels as the reason the flavors can’t be reproduced anywhere else.
“The yeast strains inhabiting the wooden barrels vary from one soy sauce brewery to another,” he says. Metal tanks, cooled, heated, and dosed with cultured yeast, are engineered to erase that variation and turn out the same thing every time. Wood does the opposite. Each barrel carries a resident community of yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that settled into the grain over generations, and every seasonal shift nudges the moromi in ways a thermostat can’t fake.
The brewer’s job, in Yugeta’s telling, isn’t to run the show. It’s to read the mash and decide when to step in. His craftspeople “do not attempt to dominate the fermentation,” as he puts it — they watch the microbes closely and guide the process toward the sauce the brewery is after. Filling a barrel and waiting isn’t a method. Knowing when to act is.
What won’t change
Spreading the fermented moromi for pressing, the step that separates raw soy sauce from the spent mash before it is refined and bottled.
Plenty about Yugeta has moved with the times. The brewery has modernized food safety, sanitation, and record-keeping, and it carries FSSC 22000 certification. But it has held three things fixed through every market shift: whole soybeans, domestically grown crops, and wooden-barrel fermentation.
That stubbornness has a history. In the postwar years, shortages pushed Japanese producers from whole soybeans toward defatted ones. In the 1970s, Yugeta’s third-generation president joined a movement to bring whole soybeans back. The fourth generation pushed further, into Japanese-grown crops and eventually certified-organic ones. For Yugeta, tradition isn’t freezing every old habit in amber. It’s deciding what’s essential and carrying that part forward in better shape than you found it.
Line the two bottles back up, and the argument finishes itself. One organic, one double-brewed. One reaching across the country, one staying in Saitama. One built for raw fish, one for seared steak and, improbably, dessert. What they share is the thing Yugeta has been saying all along: a bottle of soy sauce can taste of a place, a set of barrels, and the people who tended them.
“Soy sauce is a foodstuff; therefore, it must be safe to consume with confidence, and as a seasoning, it must taste delicious. I intend to continue using the traditional wooden-barrel brewing method to produce excellent soy sauce that complements not only Japanese cuisine but also dishes from around the world.” — Yohichi Yugeta, President, Yugeta Shoyu Ltd.
Yugeta Organic Soy Sauce and Yugeta Double Brewed Soy Sauce are available in the United States through The Japanese Pantry.
All images courtesy of Yugeta Shoyu Ltd., Sakado, Saitama Prefecture, Japan.
