BKF Bred Tosai Release – Ake Nisai (Doitsu Kogane and Aragoke) – Friday 8pm

We’re making great progress with this season’s BKF bred tosai harvests, and already we’re seeing a huge range of koi coming through.

It’s going to take a few weeks to complete all selections and grading, and to fully populate the different size bands on the website — so what you’re seeing now is just the start of what’s to come.

Ahead of this weekend, we’ve moved the first harvest from our Doitsu Kogane spawning into the sales room. Alongside these, we’ve also seen a strong number of high-quality Aragoke coming through from the same spawning.

Amanda and I spent a considerable amount of time today grading through these koi — and in particular, separating out what we refer to as our Ake Nisai.

These are the tosai we would normally retain and grow on ourselves to nisai.

Making Our Best Tosai Available Earlier

As we continue to develop the breeding side of the farm, one of our aims is to make higher-quality koi available to customers earlier in their development.

We began that process last year with selected batches, and this year we’re taking it a step further — making our Ake Nisai available from certain spawnings.

That means, for the first time, you have the opportunity to acquire some of the best koi from a spawning at the tosai stage — rather than needing to wait a full season to see them again as nisai.

This Week’s Release – What to Expect

This Friday’s online koi release will consist of a few dozen koi — all selected Ake Nisai from our Doitsu Kogane spawning.

A large proportion of these are Aragoke, and they are showing some really striking characteristics:

• Strong, well-defined scale patterns
• Excellent lustre
• Clean, balanced body shapes for their age

Sizes vary quite significantly, with many well into the 20's cm but also, some koi under 20cm.

These koi are priced on quality, not size — reflecting their potential and the level of selection, rather than simply their current length.

All koi in this release will be priced at £195 each.

This gives you the opportunity to secure one of the very best koi from this spawning at an early stage — before they are grown on and re-evaluated later.

Why This Release Matters

This release will be of particular interest if you’ve previously asked whether we would make our top-end bred koi available.

In the past, many of these fish would have been held back automatically.

Now, we’re giving you the option to access that level of koi much earlier — with the understanding that these are the fish we believe have the strongest attributes within the spawning.

Preview Videos & What to Look For

Over the next few days, we’ll be sharing our usual preview bowl videos.

For this release, we’ll also be spending more time on each koi — particularly to show the scale patterning and lustre in more detail, alongside the standard top-down view.

These are koi where the finer details really matter, so it’s worth taking the time to study them.

A Limited Opportunity

One final point — these Ake Nisai will only be available for a limited time.

After two weeks, any remaining koi will be removed from sale and grown on here at Byer Koi Farm over the summer.

So while there’s no pressure, there is a defined window to secure one of these koi at this stage of development.

Videos

We’re looking forward to presenting the best of this Doitsu Kogane spawning to you this week.

Here’s some footage from today’s grading…