Five minutes from the station the chimneys begin, red brick, one after another above white plaster walls and the grey diamond latticework the old storehouses wear. Seven breweries stand along a single narrow street in Saijo. The roof tiles are red, the walls are white, and for two days every October the whole street fills with people who have come only to drink.

Each brewery keeps a well at its gate, and each will let you drink the water it makes its sake from. This is the strange part of the visit. The wells draw on one mountain, rain that fell on Ryuozan and then spent ten or fifteen years underground, and yet the water at one gate tastes rounder in the mouth than the water four doors along.

Hiroshima sake was built on soft water. In 1897 a brewer from nearby Akitsu worked out how to ferment reliably with it, and published the method the following year so that anyone could use it. Then, in the Taisho years, the water beneath Saijo changed. It came up harder than it had been, and the technique that had made the region's name no longer quite fitted the ground it stood on.

So the brewers rebuilt the brewing around the new water instead. That is what the wells are actually showing you. Taste seven of them in an afternoon and the history stops being something you read on a plaque and becomes something you can check with your tongue.