SO What ACTUALLY is sake?
Sake is your best discovery. Come on in, and you’ll never look back! Sake is a truly unique drink: we say it is ‘brewed like a beer and enjoyed like a wine’.
Sake is a fermented beverage made from rice, its roots are Japanese and stretch back more than 500 years. Sake is easy to drink, it’s for smooth sipping. It is not strong like a spirit, as it is fermented it has relatively low alcohol which is more similar to wine strength. Junmai Sake (which we mostly make) is made from only four ingredients: rice, water, yeast and koji – a magic mould, also used to make soy & miso.
HOW IS SAKE MADE?
Brewing sake is an intricate process, the brewer’s technique, as well as the rice type and milling rate has a huge impact on the style and flavours you get in the finished drink. Sakes can range from light & floral to rich & full of umami. Sake is not just one thing, it’s an entire plethora of flavour, aroma and texture to explore.
Brewing a premium sake typically takes around three months, plus an additional two to six months for typical maturation times (and into years if not decades for aged styles). The key steps are to polish, wash, soak and steam the rice. Then a portion of this steamed rice is inoculated with millions of tiny koji spores and incubated. This incubation enables the mould to grow within the rice creating the necessary enzymes required to turn the humble rice grain into sake. This koji rice is combined with freshly steamed rice inside a fermentation vessel, alongside water and yeast starter culture, then fermentation begins.
Over several weeks the rice is broken down by these enzymes into simple sugars, which in turn are fermented by the yeast into alcohol; during this time in tank the sake also develops its complex personality. Once the tank is deemed ready, the ricey liquid is moved into the ‘pressing’ machine which removes any solids, leaving the clear liquid that we know as sake.
The sake is finally bottled, pasteurised and matured before enjoying. At KANPAI, we use bespoke modern equipment to compliment traditional Japanese brewing techniques.
Special rice grown for sake brewing (shuzo koteki mai)
Opening rice steamer (koshiki)
Rice washing to remove flour from polishing (nuka)
Digging out steamed sake rice (saka-mai)
Drained rice after soaking to absorb water (shinseki)
Cooling steamed rice by hand (horei)
Inoculating steamed rice with koji spores (koji-kin)
Combining of raw ingredients gradually over days (shikomi)
Wrapping up the koji rice in incubation room (koji-muro)
Stirring the fermentation tank (kai mixing)
Finished koji rice drying and cooling in cedar trays (futa-koji)
View of the fermenting sake mash (moromi)
Vertical press to remove solids/lees from mash (fune)
In bottle pasteurisation, then further maturation (hi-ire)
Sake lees separated from the clear sake (sake kasu)
Once matured each bottle is labelled before release
Chilled fermentation and maturation vessels (shikomi tanku)
Final clear sake (seishu)
Photos by Olivia Rawes Photography and Kanpai London Ltd.