Writer: Virginia Brown | Photographer: Bailey Dougan
Two friends go all in to position Arkansas as the sake capital of the country
Ben Bell (left) and Matt Bell, founders of Origami Sake outside the brand’s Hot Springs brewing facility.
Particular products conjure specific places. When it comes to bourbon, Kentucky is king, and California claims the most well-known wine region in the U.S., Napa Valley. Why wouldn’t Arkansas—the number one rice producer in the country—stake claim as the sake capital? That’s the goal of Arkansas natives Matt Bell and Ben Bell, founders of Origami Sake in Hot Springs.
Sharing a last name but no relation, Matt and Ben met in 2016 after Ben had returned from two years in Hanamaki, Japan, the sister city of Hot Springs. He received a sponsorship there to immerse himself in the brewing process at Nanbu Bijin, a longstanding sake producer. That experience ignited a fire in him to bring the time-honored methods back home.
Meanwhile, Matt, a Little Rock native, was running a successful solar company following graduation from the University of Arkansas. He had no interest in sake until he met Ben and a story started to emerge about the Japanese drink and its uncanny connection to the pair’s home state. At its most basic, sake demands quality water and rice—two things The Natural State has in spades.
“You can take a humble grain of rice and make infinite sakes.”
—Matt Bell, Origami Sake
“When I learned that, I thought, OK, this is more interesting, because at the time, I was not a big fan of sake; the sake I’d had before was not premium,” Matt says. “But I started investigating further and found that premium sakes were a whole different experience.”
For Origami Sake’s water, they turned to Hot Springs’s famed Ouachita aquifer. “We tap into that water, and it requires virtually no treatment. Before we even bought our building, we tested it, and it’s perfect for sake. It’s softer with the correct pH level,” Matt says. Plus, the water is devoid of minerals like iron and manganese, menaces to the sake process.
As for rice, they discovered that Isbell Farms, located near England, Arkansas, about 80 miles from Hot Springs, was the first farm in North America to have grown Japanese sake varieties of rice, like Koshihikari and Yamada Nishiki. The remaining complexities are left to head brewer and certified sakasho Justin Potts, a Pacific Northwest native who worked in Japanese breweries for 18 years and moved to Hot Springs for the venture.
In 2022, the team ran test batches and, in May 2023, they officially launched Origami, with a large-scale production facility and tasting room in Hot Springs. The name comes from the ancient Japanese art form of paper folding. “You can take a plain sheet of paper and make infinite 3D art forms,” Matt says. “The same is true for rice. You can take a humble grain of rice and make infinite sakes.” To this point, sake’s adaptable flavor makes it a perfect pairing for many menus. “Sake pairs better with food than wine. It has more flexibility, and the ability to make cocktails. We are pushing to get people to understand that,” he says. In addition to Japanese restaurants throughout the state, Origami can be found in places that don’t traditionally serve sake, such as burger restaurants and bars like Hill Station, Ciao Baci, and Hillcrest Fountain in Little Rock. The team is also looking to expand into pizza restaurants.
Today, Origami employs 17 people and has been featured in news outlets in the U.S. and in Japan. Currently exporting to nine states, they intentionally didn’t start small, but rather with the goal to create the largest domestically owned sake brewery in the U.S. “From Arkansas, let’s send products to the East Coast, the West Coast, and really scale,” Matt says. “We are the place where sake should be made and we’re going to tell that story.”
Origami Sake is served chilled in a wine glass and is more fruit-forward as opposed to drier, more bitter warm sakes.
