Fushimi's brewers do not take their water from the river beside them. They draw it from a granite aquifer beneath the district, where snowmelt has been filtering for decades. The result, called gokosui, is soft and low in iron, which is why Edo-era drinkers described Fushimi sake as gentle and the sharper brews of Nada as masculine. A Kyoto sake tasting experience here is, before it is anything else, a tasting of geology: one aquifer, roughly forty sets of hands. The district grew because of boats. The Uji River and its canals carried rice, cedar and passengers between Kyoto and Osaka, and Fushimi became the port where cargo changed vessels. Port towns drink. By the late nineteenth century some eighty kura stood within a few hundred metres of one another along the Chushojima lanes. About forty remain. Their white plaster walls, black cedar cladding and low tiled eaves still line canals where willows lean over moored jikkokubune barges, and each brewery door carries a sugidama, a ball of cedar needles hung green in autumn that browns as the new sake matures. Gekkeikan's Okura Sake Museum, at 247 Minamihama-cho, occupies one such warehouse, its rafters dark with a century of koji spores. Inside stand several thousand brewing implements — steamers, wooden fermentation vats, hand presses, measuring boxes — collectively designated tangible folk cultural property. Placards explain the toji system, the seasonal guild of master brewers who came down each winter from the Tanba hills to sleep in the kura for the length of the brewing season. Kyoto sake tasting experience tickets amount to admission to a working craft quarter rather than to a display case: the neighbouring breweries still ferment, and the smell of steamed rice reaches the street on cold mornings. That continuity is what separates Fushimi from the souvenir end of Japanese drinking culture. Junmai, ginjo and nigori styles are poured within metres of the tanks that produced them, alongside otsumami — salted rice crackers, barrel-aged miso, pickled vegetables — chosen for the way salt carries the water's softness. Fushimi sake brewery tours now follow the same lanes the barrel boats once served, past Terada-ya inn and the lock gates, and the most considered kyoto sake tasting experience tours end where the district began: at the water.