Brooklyn Kura

Est. 2018

In 2013, two Americans met at a friend’s wedding in Japan and kept finding their way back to the same topic: sake. Brian Polen was a technology analyst at American Express. Brandon Doughan was a biochemist at Oregon Health and Science University and a longtime craft beer homebrewer. Both had tasted how refined Japanese sake could be, and both knew that most Americans only ever met it as a cheap, steaming pour at a sushi bar. Somewhere in those conversations, a plan took shape: a sake brewery of their own, in New York.

Neither had brewed sake for a living, so they set about learning. They toured breweries across Japan, took courses and apprenticed with Japanese brewers, while Doughan spent roughly three years experimenting at home, leaning on his science training, his beer-brewing experience and advice from brewers he traded notes with. When he couldn’t find a suitable rice steamer in the United States, he designed and built one himself.

Brooklyn Kura opened in Industry City in Sunset Park in 2018 as New York’s first sake brewery, with a taproom set right beside the tanks. The recipe was American from the start: rice grown in the United States, such as Calrose and Yamada Nishiki, and New York City tap water filtered to remove chlorine and iron. The koji, though, is made the traditional way, by hand, from spores imported from Japan, in what the brewers describe as the most physically demanding part of the whole process.

Japan took notice. In late 2021, Hakkaisan, the respected Niigata brewery founded in 1922, announced a partnership with Brooklyn Kura, the first it had ever formed with another company at home or abroad. With that backing, Brooklyn Kura opened a 20,000-square-foot brewery and taproom in Industry City in the fall of 2023, more than doubling its brewing capacity, along with a Sake Studies Center that runs introductory classes for the public and training for restaurant and bar staff. In 2025 it became the first American-owned sake brewery to export its sake to Japan.

The mission hasn’t changed since that wedding trip: show Americans how varied good sake can be, and make it something you’d happily reach for with any meal. You can taste that in the two bottles we carry: Tidal, a dry, savory junmai made with California Calrose rice, and Occidental, a dry-hopped junmai whose bright citrus finish builds a bridge between sake and craft beer.

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