Hong Kong Tasting Trendies® Sake Awards  TTSA 2022

⭐TTSA 2022 Summary⭐
The "Hong Kong Tasting Trendies Sake Awards" was first launched in 2017 and has become the oldest sake competition in Asia outside of Japan. The award soon captured media attention from France and Mainland China when they reported on our first award ceremony. The number and diversity of participating sakes have increased year by year.

In 2019, the number of sake entering our Award has reached several hundred! The Consulate-General of Japan in Hong Kong has become the Award’s Nominal Support. It was a great honour to have their Deputy Consul General presenting the highest award to the winning sakes. We also held the award presentation in the bespoke TTSA Pavilion at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Since 2000, we have been coping with various government measures towards Covid-19. Although being forced to reduce the scale of the competition, we never gave up. The more difficult it becomes, the harder we work. This is because we know that the breweries need to stay active and increase their exposure in the international market! TTSA 2022 is our third competition since the epidemic. In the past few years, we were mainly B2C Customer-oriented with the mission of discovering and understanding users’ tastes. Starting this year, we added a B2B element. We have invited Hong Kong Federation of Restaurants & Related Trades, which has more than 8,000 restaurant members in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Wine and Spirits Association as our new supporting units. In doing so, we aim to bring our winning sakes beyond the sake industry world by help the winning sakes reach their target buyers and local agents (wine distributors) as well.

As we received many requests after the TTSA Judging Day, two sake dinners were being organised on the very next day. We successfully caught the attention of some wine distributors who took interest in some of the sakes and have asked us for the local distributors’ and the sake breweries’ contacts in Japan. We are happy to be the bridgehead!

​⭐Discovery of User Taste Indicators⭐
The purpose of TTSA is to make it easy for consumers to find out products that suit their tastes, so basically each sake is challenging with ‘itself’ - we try to find out what awards can stand out in users’ eyes, the sakes also naturally compete against each other for the championship.

When we launched the first TTSA 2017, our slogan was "Taste Index Discovery". Our mission is to 'discover' the taste of consumers in Hong Kong, one of the two major export markets for sake industry stakeholders!

This year, we specially formed a new judging group in the user category. All of these judges joined us for the first time only. These include a SSI kikizake-shi (sake sommelier), sakashō (国際酒匠) and a CEO of a group company in the coffee industry (who is an experienced coffee taster himself). The results were indeed quite different from before. For the first time since 2017, the scores between user and expert group differ by more than 10 points! We believe that this phenomenon truly reflects the meaning and mission of setting up a ‘User Group’ judging category. As users started learning more about the various styles of sake, they judge the taste of each sake based on their natural preference. The "User Group" competition results become the direct feedback of the most valuable target customers for sake brewers!

Looking forward to another breakthrough next year!
 

Kennie SO

TTSA Co-founder & Organizer