The Kokuryu brewery in Fukui uses soft water sourced from the evocative sounding Kuzuryugawa or “River of the Nine-Headed Dragon.”
“Prior to that, ginjo-shu was made for the national brewing contest,” says Shotaro Nakano, who, with his wife Akari, is the future of Dewazakura Sake Brewery in Yamagata Prefecture. “Even our brewery made ginjo-shu before 1980.” The reasonably priced Dewazakura Oka went on sale in 1980, marketing ginjo-shu to a public that still didn’t quite know what it was. The “ginjo boom” happened in the mid-1980s. According to Nakano, “Dewazakura Ouka ignited that fire.”
For a rice to be daiginjo, it must be polished to 50 percent or less. Pictured are grains of Yamada Nishiki polished to 40 percent.
Shinoda theorizes that the reason why the floral ginjo brews suddenly became popular was due to Japanese people’s diet. “Before 1970, Japanese people were eating on average 18 grams (½ ounce) of salt a day,” claims Shinoda. Foods like yakitori grilled chicken, tsukemono pickled vegetables and umeboshi pickled plums all have a high salt content. According to Shinoda, salty food makes people want to drink sweeter-tasting alcohol, which is why the heavier, richer sakes of Nada were so popular. “But that much salt isn’t good for you, and mothers started complaining to elementary schools, and school lunches became less salty,” says Shinoda. “This changed the Japanese diet.” In adulthood, these children continued to eat less salty food, and therefore preferred the floral, drier sakes of the 1980s to the sweeter brews popular in the past. “Sake is always connected to food,” says Shinoda. “This is why in the last 10 years, with more people eating salty takeout food, sweeter sakes have seen somewhat of a resurgence.”
But ginjo sake was a game changer. “Compared to previous sake, the scent of ginjo—what’s called the ginjoka—was quite different,” says Nakano. The sake world was never the same.
Some breweries have their workers directly touch their rice with their bare hands, while others worry how that will impact flavor and require their brewers to wear gloves.
One of the most important aspects not only in ginjo sake making but in all sake making is cleanliness, which helps avoid unwanted flavors.
Two brewers at the Dewazakura Sake Brewery take a breather as they remove hot rice from the steamer.
“Wataribune is a resurrected rice, so perhaps it might be better to use more of the grain,” says Tomita. “But we wanted to offer a contrast and allow people to compare sake made at the same brewery with the same water, the same yeast and the same rice, but with different polishing ratios.”
Tomita Shuzo’s results are fascinating. The 77-percent polishing-ratio bottling has fatter flavors, but the richness of the rice comes through in the more-polished daiginjo version. Yet the brewery’s less-polished version doesn’t feel top-heavy, and it has a nice, clean finish.
“The more rice is polished, the more essential the brewing technique is for the final characteristics,” says Tomita. “The less the rice is polished, the more important the flavors of the rice become.”
Cloudy and Undiluted Sake
These types of sake are closer to the uncut tipples either freshly pressed at breweries or made at home before do-it-yourself brewing became illegal in the late 19th century.
Nigorizake にごり酒: “Nigori” does not mean “unfiltered,” as it’s sometimes incorrectly translated; rather, it means “cloudy.” Since nigorizake is seishu (refined sake), it is filtered—though not to the same degree. Created in the 1960s by Kyoto’s Masuda Tokubee Shoten, it’s a modern version of doburoku, or unfiltered sake (see page 154).
Genshu 原酒: Simply put, this is undiluted sake. Typically, sake is cut with water, bringing the alcohol by volume (ABV) down to 15 to 16 percent from its original 18 to 22 percent. No brewed drink has a higher natural alcohol percentage than sake. There are genshu brews that do have ABV levels as low as 15 percent, and a sake can still be considered a genshu if it has added water. However, the water cannot lower the alcohol content by 1 percent or more.
Yasunobu Tomita holds a bottle of his brewery’s excellent junmai Wataribune brew.
Unpolished Wataribune (on the right, in the plastic bag) is contrasted with Wataribune grains polished to 77 percent (on the left, in the round case).
Just-pressed sake has a fresh, fizzy quality that vanishes during pasteurization and storage. That’s not the case with this sparkling, cloudy sake. (For more, see page 223.)
Bottles of sparkling Dassai.
Sparkling Sake
Invented in America in 1939, sparkling sake made a comeback in Japan in 1998, when Ichinokura launched Ichinokura Sparkling Sake Suzune. There are several types of sparkling sake. One style takes already fermenting unpasteurized sake and does a second fermentation in the bottle, à la champagne. The other style bottles still-fermenting nigorizake for a fizzy, tart brew. Generally, since both styles are still fermenting, they should be refrigerated. These styles are called kassei-shu (the cloudy version is dubbed kassei nigorizake). Another style adds carbon dioxide to already-fermented sake, making for a sake that is stable, but perhaps lacking personality.
In November 2016, the Japan Awasake (awa means “foam”) Association was established. The group has a handful of rules, such as: sparkling sake can only be made from rice, koji and water; the carbon dioxide must be naturally occurring (i.e., the fizz cannot be added); bubbles must be clearly evident when poured; and it must have a minimum of 10 percent alcohol by volume.
Styles of Starter
Brewing sake involves making a highly concentrated yeast starter called either a shubo (literally the “mother of sake”) or a moto (the “base” of sake). Not only can the starter dictate how fermentation progresses, but the flavors in the starter can carry over to the final sake. This brewing stage is so paramount that sakes can be categorized by their starters.
Kimoto 生酛 and yamahai