You may have come across sake on the menu of your local Japanese restaurant or seen bottles start to pop up in your neighborhood spirit shop. If you’re unfamiliar with this fermented rice beverage, consider this your sign to get to know it better.
Sake is both a drink and a window onto Japanese society. In history, legend and ceremony, secular and religious, sake is the lifeblood of Japanese civilization. To delve into sake is to time-travel through centuries of ambition, grit in times of hardship, and outstanding imagination and achievement.
What Is Sake?
There’s a lot to learn about sake and what makes it what it is, but the simple answer is that it’s an alcoholic drink made from rice.
Much akin to how wine is made using the natural sugars from grapes, sake is fermented using rice, which has no natural sugar. But even though it is often called “rice wine,” it isn’t wine at all.
Sake is made in a unique process called multiple parallel fermentation, which is more closely related to brewing beer than fermenting wine, and thus the beverage deserves its own classification.
Sake’s production process involves steaming rice and, with the help of yeast and koji spores, fermenting it. The key to quality sake is using the best ingredients.
What Are the Different Types of Sake?
There are a few main types of sake, and they typically reference the level of polishing the rice used has undergone. Rice is polished at the beginning of the sake brewing process because proteins on the outside of the rice may impact the flavor of the resulting wine.
Ginjo has 40% of the rice grain polished away, while for daiginjo it’s 50%. Sometimes, the word “junmai” is added—junmai daiginjo, for example. This “means no brewer’s alcohol was added and is a stylistic choice by the brewer and does not necessarily equate to quality.
On its own, junmai contains only only four ingredients: rice, water, yeast and koji. These work together to convert starch to sugar. Typically, 70% of the grain remains.
Additionally, though sake brewing traditions go back thousands of years, new technology and even new variations (like kosher sake) have emerged in recent years.
