I LOVE SUSHI.  That means that I find myself at Japanese style restaurants quite often.  Being the experimental type, I’m always up for trying new things.  Recently, I’ve discovered Sake.  I’d had it in the past, but I wasn’t really impressed by it.  After doing a little research, I found that the reason that I didn’t like it was because I was probably drinking inferior quality sake.  This peaked my curiosity, so I began looking at sake in a different light.  That lead me to discover that there is a lot more to sake then the cute little containers from which it’s served.

As usual, I like to start at the beginning.  Let’s look at what sake is not.  Many people refer to sake as rice wine.  Sake is not wine.  Wine is made from fruit.  Sake is made with rice — a grain.  However, sake is also not beer as some experts claim.  It is made with a grain, like beer, but sake is not carbonated and has a higher alcohol content than beer, so it shouldn’t be classified as beer either.  That leaves us with one conclusion — sake is sake.

Now that we know what it is and is not, how is it made?  As I revealed earlier, sake is made from rice.  The rice used to make sake differs from the rice that is eaten at mealtime.  The most important difference is the concentration of starches in the center.  The starch is surrounded by minerals, fats, and proteins that are detrimental to the sake-making process.  In order to remove these unwanted materials, the rice is milled or polished.  The rice use to be polished using a mortar and pestle which was hardly efficient.  These days, modern polishing machines using the latest hardware and software are used to remove the undesired materials from the rice.  The powder left behind after the polishing is complete is not discarded.  It is used to make live-stock feed, crackers, and pickles.  It’s also used to make low grade alcoholic beverages.

After the polishing step is completed, the rice is washed and soaked.  Washing the rice removes the remaining talc-like powder that remains after the polishing process.  Soaking the rice prepares it for the next step — steaming.  This is done by pumping steam directly into large vats.  After the rice is sufficiently steamed, it is allowed to cool.

Once the rice is cooled, the most delicate and complex phase of sake making takes place.  A type of mold, known as Aspergillus orryzae, is cultivated onto the steamed rice.  This is done because a starch molecule is a long chain that cannot be fermented unless it is broken down into smaller chains.  The mold breaks the long chains down into smaller molecules, actually sugars, that can be processed by yeast cells.  During this forty-to-sixty hour process, regulating temperature is crucial.  Temperature determines how dry, sweet, light, or rich the finished product will be.  The actual process gives off heat, so regulating temperature is vital, yet difficult.  Automation is used for mass-produced sake, but for the higher grade sakes, manual methods are still employed.

At this stage, we still don’t have sake, but we’re getting close.  The rice mixed with mold and yeast are transferred to a large vat where rice and water are added.  This step is repeated at least three times and is done over a four day period.  After the fourth day, the rice, water, and yeast are left to ferment from eighteen to thirty-two days.  Here, another crucial decision must be made — when should the fermentation process be stopped?  Allowing fermentation to continue too long usually leads to sake with odd undesirable flavors.

Next, the mixture is pressed through mesh in order to separate the sake from the solid remains for the fermented rice.  This use to be done by placing cotton bags full of the fermented rice into wooden boxes.  Then the bags are pressed, pushing the sake through holes in the bottom of the boxes.  These days, sake is pressed using modern machinery.  Another method that is used for some higher grade sakes is to fill bags with fermented rice and then suspending them so that the sake drips from the bags.  The yields from this process are much lower, but the sake that is produced using this method are much higher in quality.  At this point, the sake is allowed to sit for about ten days to allow residual chemical reactions to complete and sediments to settle.  Then it is filtered.  This removes unwanted flavor elements as well as sakes natural amber color.  In some cases, high grade sakes are not filtered.  These sakes are said to be more interesting and appealing.

The last step is pasteurization.  This allows sake to be stored without refrigeration.  Interestingly, it was discovered that heating sake briefly deactivated the enzymes and killed any remaining bacteria in the sake long before Louis Pasteur was credited with the technique.

So, there you have it — sake unfiltered.  This brief description of how sake is made hardly does justice to the complex set of processes involved in its production.  It does, however, give you an idea of how it is done.  Next, I’d like to look at some of the different types of sake and maybe even get into the descriptions of actual sake that I’ve sampled.