The water is called miyamizu, drawn from an underground flow off the Rokko range. It is hard, carrying the minerals that yeast wants, and sake brewed with it comes out clean and firm rather than soft. Brewers elsewhere have been buying it by the tanker load for well over a century.

The breweries stand in a line along the coast east of Kobe, in five districts that give the region its name. The wind that comes down off the mountains in winter is cold enough to brew in, so the work is done in the cold months. The rice is Yamada Nishiki, grown inland in the same prefecture. The brewers came traditionally from Tanba, over the hills, and their methods happened to suit hard water.

By the late Edo period barrel ships were carrying something like a million barrels a year down the coast to Edo, and a large share of what the capital drank was made here. Itami and Ikeda had held that trade first. Nada took it, gradually, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The region now has a protected designation, so the name can be printed on the label. Five districts on a map, functioning as the name of a drink, which is what a place name becomes when enough people agree about it.