Fushimi rests on an aquifer so soft that brewers named its wells gokosui — auspicious, fragrant water — and raised more than twenty kura above it. Any Kyoto sake tasting bar in this quarter is, in the end, a room built over that water and the mineral arithmetic it carries. The district was a port before it was a brewing town. Rice, barrels and passengers once moved downriver toward Osaka aboard flat-bottomed jikkokubune, and the Horikawa canal still runs past the willows behind Minamihama-cho. Gekkeikan opened here in 1637 as Kasagiya, a single wooden brewery under the Okura family. By the twentieth century Fushimi stood as the second pillar of Japanese sake, matched only by Nada in Hyogo. Chemistry accounts for the difference. Nada's hard water ferments quickly and finishes sharp; the low-mineral wells of 伏見の酒蔵, Fushimi's sake kura, yield a slower, rounder liquid that brewers here still call onna-zake. What travellers now search for as kyoto sake tasting bar tickets is housed inside a brewery completed in 1909. Its plaster walls are darkened by pine soot; its roof carries the same kawara tiles as the machiya lining the lane. The building stands at 247 Minamihama-cho, a short walk from the old canal moorings. Production shifted elsewhere decades ago, and in 1982 the structure reopened as the Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum. The holdings run to more than six thousand brewing implements — koji trays, rice-steaming koshiki, cedar fune presses, the worn ledgers of Tanba toji who came down each winter — a collection Kyoto City designated a Tangible Folk Cultural Property. The place matters because Fushimi never became a museum of itself. Roughly twenty breweries still operate within walking distance; the sugidama, the cedar ball hung above a doorway, still browns through the season as the new sake ages beneath it. Admission runs 600 JPY and covers museum entry, tasting and a souvenir bottle. Indoors, the exhibition rooms supply the grammar — polishing ratios, koji mould, the three-stage sandan-jikomi mash — and the surrounding kura speak it aloud, which is why a Fushimi sake brewery tour and most kyoto sake tasting bar tours through Kyoto's southern landmarks begin on this corner of Minamihama-cho.