Consolidating Data and Improving Sake Quality using AWS and RATOC Systems with Tsurumi Syuzou

Tsurumi Syuzou was founded in 1873 in Tsushima, Aichi, Japan, which is known as the economic center of Lord Nobunaga. The company produces high-grade sake brands, such as Gazan, which uses 100 percent Yamada Nishiki sake rice from the A+ class region in Hyogo, and Sanso, which is brewed with Yamada Nishiki under thorough low-temperature control. Tsurumi Syuzou develops higher-quality sake by harmonizing modern quality control with handcrafted brewing that takes advantage of the Nanbu toji brew master technique.

The three most important stages in the sake brewing process are malt making after steaming, yeast mash making, and moromi making, all of which require strict temperature control. Traditionally, sake makers needed to check these temperatures in the brewery and relied on the skill and experience of a brew master (toji). However, the aging of toji masters, the workforce shortage, and the need to pass on skills have become challenges at sake brewing sites, necessitating reforms in the way brewers work. Tsurumi Syuzou was also facing these challenges and was searching for a production method that did not rely solely on the intuition of the toji and other sake brewers.

To modernize its approach, Tsurumi Syuzou focused on the automation of temperature control, which was already being used by advanced sake breweries, and considered deploying a system to visualize the temperature of malt, yeast mash, and moromi. “In order to continue to produce steadily better-tasting sake, we felt that we should deploy a system where anyone could check the product temperature and control quality while using the skills and experience of our toji and pass on the art of sake brewing to the next generation,” says Shinsuke Wada, CEO of Tsurumi Syuzou.

The company began working on the project in 2019, initially using a solution that connected temperature sensors to a PC with a wired cable. However, it had to stop using the solution due to issues such as long intervals between data acquisition and the impossibility of remote monitoring. Instead, Tsurumi Syuzou replaced the solution with Moromi Diary (PC version) from RATOC Systems in October 2020, achieving remote temperature monitoring, and in October 2021, the PC version was upgraded to the more advanced Moromi Diary Cloud.

“The reason for adopting Moromi Diary is that it wirelessly collects temperature data centrally and can be remotely monitored from a PC or smartphone,” says Wada. “Additionally, being able to visualize changes in temperature on a graph was a decisive factor. Then, the evolution from the PC version to the cloud version provided more stable wireless connection and more frequent data acquisition.”

Moromi Diary Cloud connects data from product temperature sensors to the gateway through Wi-SUN, a wireless standard for smart meters, and uploads the data to the AWS Cloud with LTE-M communication using cellular phone lines. It helps the brewers to access the data stored in the cloud from anywhere using a PC or smartphone, check temperatures in near real time, view graphs of temperature changes, and create and output reports.

The Moromi Diary Cloud environment is built on AWS, including services like AWS IoT and Amazon DynamoDB. The solution runs code using AWS Lambda and stores data using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). “Since adopting AWS when we developed a product to remotely control home appliances, released in 2015, we have developed various IoT products with technical support from AWS,” says Yuji Shindo from the sales department at RATOC Systems. “Since we had plenty of knowledge about AWS, it was a natural choice for us to adopt AWS to Moromi Diary Cloud.”