Kii Yuzu & White Peach Study (60/40)
Yuzu from Mihama-cho in Wakayama, pressed with white peach from the same prefecture. The 60/40 ratio was settled after …
¥750
9
Farms across five prefectures
14
Collaborators credited on the menu since 2019
47
Retired recipes published on Stories
312
Fruits pressed in our founding study
About
A bit more
The bar now sources from nine farms across five prefectures. Haruki visits each farm at least once per season, usually with a refractometer and a camera. 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: Haruki, 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 Tuesdays for deep cleaning and farm visits.
The number that stuck with him was 34 percent.News & Announcements
News & Announcements
2025-07-12
Why the Brix number on your juice bottle actually matters
Every bottle of juice that leaves Clay Crest 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
34 percent: the fruit waste figure that started this bar
Somewhere in the back of Haruki Nishimoto's kitchen there is a graph-paper notebook, water-stained on the cover, that contains four years of produce waste tallies from a mid-sized Osaka distribution hub. The number that fills the most space in that notebook is 34 percent. Not an estimate, not an industry average pulled from a trade association PDF — a figure Haruki 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 Clay Crest Zone. The methodology matters here, because "food waste" is a phrase that gets used loosely, and Haruki's 34 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 yuzu-peach blend
Most juice blends at most bars are built on instinct. Someone in a kitchen decides that equal parts sounds fair, and equal parts is what ends up in the bottle. We wanted to do this differently with our Kii Yuzu and White Peach blend, so we ran a structured tasting study across three weeks, logged every ratio, and treated the whole thing like a small sensory science experiment. The results surprised us, specifically how badly a 50/50 split performed, and how narrow the window of genuinely good ratios actually is. This article is a full account of the methodology, the measurements, and the failures, because we think the process is as interesting as the product.
Read more →Founder
With respect
Haruki Nishimoto
Founder, Established since 2019
Haruki Nishimoto grew up in Nara and studied agricultural economics at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto before spending four years in produce logistics at a wholesale 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 Clay Crest 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?
Brix measures the sugar content of a liquid as a percentage by weight. A reading of 12 means roughly 12 grams of sugar per 100 grams of juice. We post it not because high Brix is better, but because it tells you something real about the fruit that week. A tomato at 6.8 Brix is a different experience from one at 9.2.
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. Three of our current fourteen items started as customer suggestions. The yuzu-peach study came from a regular who had been asking about it since spring 2024.
Why are you closed on Tuesdays?
Tuesdays are for farm visits and deep cleaning. We go to at least one farm per month, and Tuesday 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 currently. We have had a few conversations about it but the volume required would change how we source, and we are not ready to do that. If you run a small restaurant and want to talk about a very small arrangement, send us an email. We are open to the conversation, just not to anything that changes the farm relationships.
Reader-supportedReply via newsletterOpen data