Maruo Honten was founded in 1885 near Kotohira Shrine in Kagawa Prefecture, and Yorokobi Gaijin is brewed with an obsessive focus on individual rice lots, never blending rice from different growers or blending separate fermentation tanks. Owner and toji Maruo Tadaoki bottles each tank separately, producing up to 30 different expressions annually from small ferments of 600 to 1,000 kilograms of rice. He primarily uses Oseto rice indigenous to Kagawa, as well as rare Kameno-o sourced from a single young grower in Iwate whose entire harvest he purchases each year.
