The Till

Sake takes a little getting used to. The highest compliment I heard at a recent event was “this tastes exactly like I think sake is supposed to.” Mingling around and trying different expressions back to back gives you rapid fire exposure to the nuances of the various different styles. In my uneducated opinion, most were pretty mediocre. Unlike wine where region is the major delineating factor, in Japan sake can be produced anywhere. What separates the different grades of sake is how finely the rice kernels are milled before brewing. Sake rice is a much larger grain than traditional eating rice, and for premium grades of sake less than half of the original kernel remains. The more pure the starch center, the better it will interact with the koji, which is a mold-like substance that converts grains into sugars that the yeast can then turn into alcohol. Traditionally this practice is done with long poles by hand, kneading the mixture like a ball of bread dough. Thousands of different breweries dotted the landscape and for more than a millenia after its discovery, sake was a very local tradition. Yet as industry advanced, the twentieth century saw the number of breweries collapse from 5,000 to less than 1,000. Now almost two thirds of the production is in the “ordinary” category, where there is no milling requirement and healthy doses of brewer’s alcohol are also added. The consolidation of the industry means that the top ten producers account for roughly 40% of…