Maizuru Pear & Sanbokan Study (55/45)
Pears from Maizuru in northern Kyoto, pressed with sanbokan citrus from the same coast. The 55/45 ratio was settled after …
¥750
9
Farms across two prefectures
14
Collaborators credited on the menu since 2019
47
Retired recipes published on Stories
41
Fruits pressed in our founding study
About
A bit more
The bar now sources from six growers across two prefectures. Sae visits each farm at least once per season, usually with a refractometer and a notebook. The photos go on the wall behind the counter, labeled with the farm name and the date. Nothing on the wall is older than one year. The team is three people: Sae, Yuki Ogawa who handles fermentation and shrub production, and Sota Fujii who manages the morning press and the weekly waste log. They are open six days a week and closed on Mondays for deep cleaning and farm visits.
The number that stuck with him was 27 percent.News & Announcements
News & Announcements
2025-07-12
Why the Brix number on your juice bottle actually matters
Every bottle of juice that leaves Clover Vault Zone has a Brix number printed on the label, tucked beneath the ingredient list where most people never look. It sits there like a footnote from a science textbook, and for years customers who noticed it at all mostly asked whether higher meant better. The honest answer is: it depends, and the longer version of that answer turns out to be genuinely interesting. Over 14 weeks of cold-press production runs this past harvest season, the team logged Brix readings at intake, post-press, and post-filtration for every single batch. What the data showed surprised even the people doing the pressing. This piece is an attempt to decode one small number that carries a surprising amount of information about where your fruit has been before it becomes a drink.
Read more →2026-02-11
27 percent: the fruit waste figure that started this bar
Somewhere in the back of Sae Furukawa's kitchen there is a set of index cards, rubber-banded and warped, that contains three seasons of ripeness readings from a mid-sized Osaka distribution hub. The number that fills the most space in that notebook is 27 percent. Not an estimate, not an industry average pulled from a trade association PDF — a figure Sae calculated himself, route by route, week by week, during his time moving fruit and vegetables from the Osaka Central Wholesale Market out to restaurants and hotel kitchens across the Kansai region. This article is about where that number came from, what it actually measures, and why it is the honest founding document of Clover Vault Zone. The methodology matters here, because "food waste" is a phrase that gets used loosely, and Sae's 27 percent means something specific — specific enough to be argued with, which is part of the point.
Read more →2025-02-21
How we tested 22 ratios to find the right pear-sanbokan blend
Sanbokan and pear refuse to split evenly, and the even split was the most forgettable thing we made. Twenty-two ratio trials over three weeks, and what the failures taught us.
Read more →Founder
With respect
Sae Furukawa
Founder, Established since 2019
Sae Furukawa grew up in Maizuru and studied food science at Kyoto Prefectural University in Kyoto before spending six years at a fruit auction house cold room, distributor in Osaka. His work there involved grading and routing fruit for restaurant supply chains, which gave him an unusually detailed picture of what happens between a farm and a glass. He left the distributor in late 2018 and opened Clover Vault Zone in March 2019. His data methodology has been cited in a piece by food journalist Emi Sato and referenced in a short feature in Kyoto Journal. Outside the bar, he keeps a home fermentation shelf with about 30 active jars and reads agricultural statistics reports for fun, which his staff finds alarming.
FAQ
Common questions
What does the Brix number on the bottle actually mean?
We take a refractometer reading at intake and another at pressing. The gap between the two tells us how the fruit travelled and how long we have before it needs to be in a bottle. It is a working number, not a grade.
Can I request a specific fruit or combination?
Yes, and we take those requests seriously. If you suggest something and we test it, we will tell you the result. If it makes the menu, you get credited on the tag. Four of our current fourteen items started as customer suggestions. The pear-sanbokan study came from a regular who had been asking about it since spring 2024.
Why are you closed on Mondays?
Mondays are for orchard visits and deep cleaning. We go to at least one farm per month, and Monday is the day most of our suppliers are available for a proper conversation rather than a quick handoff at the market. The cleaning takes about four hours. We do not cut it short.
Do you do wholesale or supply to restaurants?
Not at the moment. Wholesale would mean committing to volumes our six growers cannot promise, and we would end up buying from people we have never met to fill the gap. If a restaurant wants a standing weekly order of what we already press, that we can do — ask.
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