The Japanese sake industry is in crisis. Consumption of what was for centuries the country’s most popular alcoholic drink— so integral to the economy that it was used as a tax substitute—and its industry, run by the government, is in decline and has been for years. The Japanese now drink just over a third the amount of sake they did forty years ago—185 million gallons per year compared to 449 million in 1975. Instead, beer has been the drink of choice for the majority of Japanese since 1965, with wine rapidly on the rise, too—both are now produced with varying degrees of success domestically. (Japanese beer: terrific. Japanese wine: I’ve tasted it, so you don’t have to.)
Sake breweries are closing throughout Japan (down from 30,000 a century ago to just 1,450 today), with many more facing bankruptcy. Making sake is a tough, labor-intensive, low-profit business, and young members of the Japanese workforce would rather work in offices and shops than slave in uncomfortable conditions making a drink no one wants anymore. The skills of the master sake brewer are in danger of disappearing forever. The world of the sake brewery is one of the most traditional, hierarchical, and chauvinistic in this most traditional, hierarchical, and chauvinistic country. Until very recently—and still to this day in some cases—sake breweries were run more along the lines of monasteries than businesses, closed to the outside world and suspicious of innovation.
Which makes it all the more improbable that my two sake contacts turned out to be an Englishman and a woman. We’ll meet the Englishman first, because he gave me my introduction to the world of sake, a baptism by firewater.
Philip Harper and I had arranged to meet in a vast sports hall an hour or so outside of Hiroshima. I could already smell the sake in the parking lot, the sweet, yeasty aromas of rice wine wafting gently on the breeze. Inside, the fumes were almost overpowering, as Japan’s best sake producers displayed their wares and tasted each other’s products. The hall was filled with ten rows of trestle tables sporting serried ranks of green sake bottles; each table had a long, winding queue of patient sake enthusiasts—around five hundred in all—brandishing plastic tasting cups. This was the largest and most prestigious sake-tasting event of the year, the National Assessment for New Sake, founded by the National Research Institute of Brewing, itself founded by the tax department of the Ministry of Finance in 1904.
It was clearly a serious-minded occasion. The hall was virtually silent but for the odd clink of glass and porcelain and a symphony of staccato slurps and exaggerated sniffs. The floor, covered with plastic sheeting, was sticky with spilled sake. I joined a queue with my own plastic beaker, having spotted the only other Westerner—presumably Philip—in the room, a little ahead.
I began tasting my way up the tables. Each bottle had a small porcelain dish in front of it, like an ashtray but decorated with a blue spiral and traditionally used to judge the clarity of sake. Tasters used small plastic pipettes to pipe sake into the dish to observe its color and into their cups for tasting.
I tasted my first, from a bottle with a promising gold medal hanging around its neck. It was flowery and fruity with a milk-like viscosity. The second was a little sour and yeasty, not so nice. By the third sake, and from that point onward, my only real tasting note was “petroleum.” Apparently, my palate was not all that well equipped to appreciate the nuances of sake.
“There’s no cheap stuff here!” said Philip, finally spotting me. “We’re all checking up on each other, the competition. Everyone wants to win a medal here; it is about the only acknowledgment you can get in the sake world. I have had a silver medal in the past, but nothing this year.”
I asked Philip, age forty-two, with curly red hair and a plump, expressive face, to explain a little about what was going on. “This is the higher echelon of sakes. The rice used to make them will have been polished to 35 percent.” I must have looked a little befuddled at this point, as Philip stopped suddenly.
“Do you know anything about sake?”
“I, erm, uh…”
“OK,” he said, mentally rolling up his sleeves. “Sake is graded according to how much of the rice used to make it has been polished away before fermentation. They take the rice, put it in large revolving tanks, and spin it until the outer husk of the grains is worn away. It is the single most important element of sake making. The rice used to make the sakes here will have been polished to 35 percent, which is used to make the most refined type of sake. The less they polish the rice, the less refined the sake will be.”
Why was sake in such decline in Japan? I asked. “Consumers in Japan perceive it as old-fashioned. Also there is a lovely convention with sake that you never pour for yourself—the person you are dining with should pour for you. But I think part of the problem is that in the corporate world this has been abused so that the new guy always has to drink until he pukes, because the bosses keep pouring. It has that association for some.” Apparently, a few years ago rumors also spread—I’d guess from the beer industry—that sake gave you bad breath and was acidic in the stomach, which can’t have helped.
We were tasting as we talked and, though we were spitting into aluminum buckets, I was beginning to feel a little swimmy. My mouth had gone slightly numb, too. Philip was encouraging me to note the “melon, honey, and yeast” flavors of the sakes, but all I was getting was “white spirit.”
“Luckily, it is picking up in the States. Sake has kind of followed in the wake of sushi over there, and they take it very seriously,” he said. “Wine people are discovering sake and realizing you can do things with it that you can’t with wine, because it isn’t as acidic as wine. It doesn’t mess with your stomach so much.”
As well as the degree to which the rice used to make it is polished, sake is graded on a sweetness-to-dryness scale, ranging from +15 for the driest to −15 for the sweetest. It is slightly stronger than wine, typically 14 to 16 percent alcohol, although genshu sake, which isn’t diluted prior to sale, as other types are, has an alcohol content of 20 percent. I assumed that, as with wine, there are sake snobs, and that they would prefer the dry stuff. Philip shook his head. “There are good sakes throughout the range. Actually, I don’t think there is enough snobbery about sake. It is really underappreciated in Japan.” The Japanese are famous for paying massively over the odds for French wines and Scottish whiskeys, but when it comes to sake, they will rarely spend more than ¥10,000 ($83) on a bottle, and even the most expensive bottle of high-grade dai gingo sake, the type being tasted here, won’t cost more than ¥30,000 ($240). “The gold medal winners here won’t sell for more than ¥10,000,” Philip added. That said, true sake obsessives take their passion to extraordinary lengths: there are sake fans who devote themselves not just to one type of sake or rice but to one producer of the koji culture used to ferment the rice, for example. And they are not averse to using the wine snob’s florid similes; comparing one sake to “the smell of slate when it’s split” is one of Philip’s, for instance.
Philip first came to Japan as an English teacher twenty years ago but only gradually grew to appreciate Japan’s national drink. “When I first came, I would often drink the cheap stuff, but then met some friends who were into good sake.” There was no looking back from that point; the drink became his life as he went to work at a brewery in 1991, after almost a decade becoming a toji, master brewer—the first foreigner ever to achieve this ranking. It wasn’t an easy journey: “They all pretty much ignored me to start with; it was like joining a monastery. Early on, I had one Japanese person tell me that I would never be able to taste things the way a Japanese person could. There’s no point in talking to those people.”
By now my mouth was in a state of near paralysis. “Here, taste this. It’s from Tokyo. Tokyo’s known for its rather rough sake,” he said.
I tasted. It was aggressively floral, cloying, acidic, with more of a petroleum aftertaste.
“Now try this one.”
“Ugh, that’s not much better,” I said.
“Oh,” said Philip. “That’s mine.”
I blustered about no longer being able to taste anything, but Philip was very understanding. “Don’t worry, it’s not one of my best. And, you should know, this event is designed to show the sakes at their very worst—room temperature really shows their faults. If a sake tastes good at this temperature, then it is really good.” This explained a lot.
I asked Philip, who has written an excellent guide to sake called The Book of Sake, about the myths surrounding sake. What were the most misleading? “Some people still think it is a spirit [sake is brewed and has more in common with beer]. Then there are some that say only the best ones should be drunk cold and otherwise it should be drunk warm. Actually, that’s complete bollocks. There are good sakes at every temperature, but even the Japanese are quite ignorant about sake. Another is that they shouldn’t be aged, at least not beyond two years, but some can be, and I think aged sake will be the next big thing. Aged sake tastes a little like sherry; it’s great. Unpasteurized sakes are also getting more popular—although they have to be kept refrigerated and drunk young.”
The Japanese have never really paired sakes with food in the same way that we do with wine in the West. With wine, it is often the case that local food goes well with local wine, or the wine becomes an ingredient in a dish, but in Japan, though you can sometimes note regional consistencies in sake, sakes from the same town are just as likely to be similar as they are to be different from one another, depending on the type of rice used and, of course, the degree to which the rice has been polished. Shizuo Tsuji writes, firmly, that sake should never be drunk with any dishes containing rice, basing this on the flimsy logic that, as it is also made with rice, these two like poles will repel. Philip disagrees. “Most sake goes with most food because of its umami content [it has high levels of amino acids]. People also say sake doesn’t go well with Western food, but it does. Sake is packed with umami flavors—it goes particularly well with Italian food, for instance. And, you know, all those people you see drinking beer with sushi are making such a mistake. Beer goes horribly with the vinegar and sugar in sushi, but sake is brilliant with all fish. It is also nonsense that sake gives you bad hangovers.”
That was good news as, by now, having tasted over forty different sakes, I was well and truly in my cups. I bade a slurred farewell to Philip, who, as we parted, gave me a contact for a brewery in Kyoto that he said might be of interest.
* * *
Sake brewing has much in common with soy and miso production: you take a crop—in this case, rice—steam it, add a bacterial fermenting agent, or koji, and leave it for between a fortnight and a couple of months. Thus, you can make sake wherever there is a good supply of water (an average brewery might use up to 2,500 gallons in a day during the busy season, preferably with a low iron content). The Fushimi quarter of Kyoto, on the banks of the Uji River, is especially renowned for producing quality, refined sakes, largely because of its good supply of soft springwater. We happened to be staying in the city just as the brewing season started (sake is brewed in winter because it is easier to control fermentation and discourage bacteria in cool weather), so I went along to the Tama no Hikari brewery, one of seventeen breweries in this part of town, where I was met by Akira Toko, Philip’s contact.
Tama no Hikari is a small, high-quality producer of a junmai ginjo sake (made with rice polished down to 60 percent or less), founded in 1673 by the Ukita family, who still run it to this day. Akira-san, a petite, friendly woman in her early thirties, took me on a tour of the brewing plant. The rice harvest had recently finished, and they had begun the polishing, the first stage of sake production. All rice starts off brown, of course. To make sake, this brown husk is removed, layer by layer (and, unfortunately for the Japanese, who prefer the appearance of white rice, nearly all the vitamins and nutrients are contained in the brown husk), depending, as Philip had said, on the quality of the sake that will result: the best sake is made with rice stripped down to a small, pearl-like nugget.
The noise from the five polishing machines was deafening as they churned the rice to remove, in this particular case today, 40 percent of each grain. The polishing causes the rice to heat up and so, afterward, it is left for a month to cool down naturally.
“Good fermentation means slow fermentation!” Akira-san shouted. “No sugar or alcohol added. But the real secret is really good rice. We use omachi rice, which is an old type of rice that our company revived. It is difficult to grow because it grows very high, and that makes it vulnerable, and the yield is low. You know, even some sake experts don’t know that omachi rice was the original sake rice.”
I asked Akira-san if she agreed with Philip that there was a crisis in the sake industry. “It’s true, it is very bad economically. It’s since we started getting so many more different wines to choose from about twenty years ago. Chinese sake has given it a bad name as well, and sake is not cool among the young. But they are starting to appreciate it in America. If we could just get a small portion of the premium wine market over there.” With this in mind, the company president was leaving for the States the next day, where the world’s second-largest sake tasting is held.
We passed through the bottling plant. It was run by a man wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that said: “I am getting in touch with my inner bitch.” Next, we washed our hands and donned white hats to enter the brewing house and temperature-controlled seed-mash rooms, with walls eight inches thick.
The smell inside was wonderful: heavily sweet, sweaty, and yeasty. It was the smell of fecund decay, noble rot Japanese-style—in this case prompted by the addition to the steamed rice of a yellow powder, a koji, or Aspergillus oryzae. This produces enzymes that turn the starch into sugar and kick off the fermentation. “I think making sake in the traditional way like this makes for very different flavors,” Akira-san said. “High-quality sake needs human senses: touch, taste, smell.”
Akira-san introduced me to the toji, the man responsible for the fermentation of the rice, Masuo Kobayashi, a squat, stern man with forty years’ experience tending moldy rice. I asked him the secret of good sake: “Lactic acid is the key to good flavor,” he said enigmatically (Akira-san translating), then walked off to attend to his rice. He showed me a rice mash that had been fermenting for just one day—it looked like rice that had been boiled, then left to dry. But the two-day mash was already liquefying thanks to those powerful enzymes, and it was beginning to smell a little funkier, too. He told me that over the next two weeks it would warm to almost 105°F. Apparently, after a while, the mash begins to move in waves, all by itself, caused by the fermentation; it looks as if a sea snake were hunting beneath its surface and produces a good deal of carbon dioxide, too.
I left Tama no Hikari with a generous gift of a large bottle of their finest-grade sake. It was a revelation after my tasting trauma in Hiroshima. Philip was right; it was full-bodied with a satisfyingly rich umami depth and a lovely, fresh fruitiness. Perhaps I could become a sake fan after all.