Fushimi: The secret sake city

Having heard that Fushimi was home to numerous sake breweries, we made our way down for a festive Saturday afternoon. We spent an hour or so trying to find information online, and with no more than a link to the Sake museum, and Kizakura (a sake and beer brewery) we set off for Fushimi.

A quick subway/train ride south on the Keihan line and you will find yourself in Fushimi. If you speak Japanese, you may be able to make some sense of the maps around town. Unfortunately for us, we don't speak quite enough to make much of the maps. Instead we wandered around Fushimi for a bit, becoming more and more disappointed.

Continuing to search the internet on our phones we found that there was a brewery on the edge of town, whose name we are no longer able to find online (Sorry!). Regardless, we walked the 15 minutes from one edge of town to the other, only to find the now-forgettable brewery closed to the public.

On the up side, we did find a funky little shop that served sake from a small spigot in the wall. Yes, that's right fellow drinkers -a booze-serving spigot, in the wall of a small, rice-dealing shack.

In addition to a small bottle of sake, we picked up a 200 yen (~$2.00) cup of Umeshu to go. 

Small sake samples, and pricing in the background. 

Filling our sake bottle from a spigot in the wall. All the complaints about Fushimi disappeared -This was totally bad ass! 

Adding a finish touch of gold foiling. Keeping it classy in Fushimi.

Small snack and tasting bar at Kizakura brewery. They also apparently have a stellar restaurant, but we cannot verify this as we didn't try it on this trip. 

A couple weird/interesting items from one of the brewery's mini-museums...

The peeing (or whatever) river creatures seems really popular, as we saw similar statues all over town.