The Cloudy Origins of Sake and Other Sips of History

36:45And I mean, the people featured were anonymous. And there are people on the left who are using Dobroku to try to push government policy. There's this very famous activist named Maeda Toshihiko who was involved in the protests against Narita Airport. And he started brewing Doboroku kind of to advocate for the fact that it should be legal. You know, it's part of his constitutional guaranteed right to pursue happiness is to homebrew. And yet the government cracked down on him. And, you know, he kind of rubbed it in the government's face because he invited the head of the National Tax Agency, which regulates liquor in japan invited that person to his dobroku party um and he was kind of like he wanted to make a scene okay yeah yeah that's uh that's that's uh that's being the nail that's gonna get pounded down i feel yeah but it went all the way to the japan supreme court and so uh ultimately the government said no you can't uh can't homebrew which i think is really unfortunate you know it really is so at least on the books it sounds like alcohol production alcohol consumption in japan has been heavily regulated since maybe the 1600s as you were saying earlier it maybe not it might be on the books but people are basically free to ignore it up until the the end of the 19 the 1800s maybe but yeah you can even push that back further like to the 14th century or 15th century, 15th century, definitely, when the government realizes they can make money from the brewers.

38:32They can tax the brewers. They can tax them and get a lot of revenue that way. And so once they see that as a source of revenue, they're going to promote brewing because that helps the government. So medieval shogunate's doing that. And I think it's been that government policy since then. sometimes to the improvement of sake, sometimes to the detriment of sake, historically, in retrospect, at least. Because the government's really interested in improving the quantity of sake produced during the Meiji period, right? Oh, sure. And they're doing all sorts of things to try to improve sake, too. But that's not necessarily for imports or exports in the way that silk production is also heavily subsidized so that they can sell silk overseas.

39:24But they're not selling sake overseas per se, right? No, not yet. But it is, you know, in terms of like where it ranks above silk, I mean, for a while, the sake industry is producing much more economically than the silk industry, even though it's a domestic product, which is pretty amazing. When is the big, like, when does sake exports become a thing that the tax man cares about? Yeah, I think it's pretty recent. It's after World War II, definitely.

40:00Because, well, sake enters a dark valley in World War II, and the government decides that the rice that's being used for sake, that needs to be eaten. yet we need alcohol so they promote beer and that's when beer really takes off so if you're fighting in the japanese army or navy you're going to be drinking beer most of the time oh really and the japanese government's pretty good about supplying beer to the troops and at home because when they think about beer they think about it as a modern advanced beverage one that doesn't use rice uh it's what the germans drink so uh that's what gets promoted and it's maybe easier because there's there's one brew company they they take all the breweries there's like four or five breweries major corporations and they roll them into one uh and so it's easier to control than all these sake breweries when you have hundreds and hundreds of sake breweries so yeah the sake industry really takes a hit and i don't think it's until you know the 1950s and 60s that japan thinks about even thinks about exporting sake during the war period like is the style of production basically also streamlined and made into one way of making sake or like can things differences like kimoto and yamaha or bodemoto that kind of thing still exist they exist but not, it's difficult, I guess is the answer because there's not a lot of resources.

41:35You can't get polished rice. Even consumers can't buy polished rice. So what they do is they take the old sake bottles and they put their brown rice into it and they give Junior a stick and tell him to get to work for a couple hours and Junior will polish the family's rice for them, even though you're not supposed to do that. You know, here's a good example of people doing things that they're not supposed to do. They're not supposed to polish rice, but they do. Why doesn't the government want you to polish rice? Because, well, lots of nutrients are lost and the government's very interested in nutrition in wartime.

42:12So the breweries, they don't have access to polished rice. A lot of the breweries' staff have to let go half of their staff, direct those to wartime industries. And then what is the dominant sake that's being made? It's this two-thirds sake. And what that is, it's a sake that's developed in the Japanese colony of Manchuria. It's an artificial sake in that two-thirds of the ingredients are not sake. their sugars, their flavorings brewers alcohol and the like and this recipe is invented there and then it becomes the norm during the war for other brewers and then the unfortunate thing is that it continues in the post-war period and actually until quite recently this two-thirds sake which was great for the brewers economically but in retrospect kind of ruined people's taste for sake and gives you a bad bang bad hangover i understand too is it made today or is it entirely gone i don't think it's made today no at least if it's made it's not called sake the way it was but legally it was called sake for a long long time yeah that i have noticed um so from time to time i have the opportunity to do like a tasting for visitors to japan who are interested in sake and it definitely seems like the definition of sake is very broad in terms of what it can and can't be and then in terms of like flavor profile especially yeah and is that's just kind of like how it's always been it sounds like there has never really been like oh this flavor of sake is going to we're going to call this this or anything like that Well, I don't know.

44:10I think, you know, of course, people have their favorite breweries. If we go back to the 1920s, people have their favorite breweries or before that, their folks have their favorite breweries, whatever they are. But these distinctions like ginjo, daiginjo, they really don't become prominent until the post-war period. Although they're around in some brewing circles when they're trying to make sake for an award, they'll do that. So those are – and legally, those become more prominent more recently. Something like – what's the word for sake when you don't add alcohol to it? but I'm drawing a blank here.

44:50It's early in the morning in Kansas. Junmai? Yeah, Junmai Shu. That's a term that most people will know in the 1970s, 1980s. They don't know what Junmai Shu is. They might be making it, but they don't have a kind of sense for what that is as a product. So that too is a very recent term. So a lot of the terms that we think about as kind of hard and fast are very recent in the long history of sake brewing. What would be the equivalent terms that people used to use that we don't use anymore? Well, you know, the thing is up until the 17th century, sake is brewed year round. And so there's actually all these terms for sake, depending on the season and depending on the brewing method.

45:44because if you think back to the 17th century or earlier, there's no refrigeration. So in the summer months, you're going to be using something like a bodai moto, you know, and then you can change your techniques as the months get colder. There's all these sort of nuanced terms for these different types of sake that are being produced. And then it all ends. Then at the end of the 17th century, the government says you have to brew sake in wintertime. They're not saying that because it tastes better. It happens to taste better than summer brew. They're saying that to try to cut sake consumption and production.

46:22And then the labor force kind of follows that and it becomes flavor intensive in those winter months. And then that's what we think of as sake, something produced in the wintertime. But before that, there's all kinds of different sake that are being made. And that's part of the project in my book is to try to recover that. What do people mean by sake in the medieval period? What are they drinking? What could it be? And people have a sense for different areas of production, even back then. Different temple breweries, for example, have famous types of sake. And it's referred to as this temple sake is better than that other place's sake?

47:01Or is it just like, wow, I had this and it was really good? Yeah. So, for example, a lot of these temples are in the Nara area. And Hideyoshi, like this one temple. Hideyoshi being the warlord who conquered Japan in the late 16th century. He liked this one temple called Amano. And Amano had this sake. And he wrote to them and said, stop adding ash to your sake. And the reason why the brewers were doing that is to try to clarify the sake. But he didn't like that because it changed the acidity of the sake. And I guess I don't know what they responded, but maybe they sent him a batch without the ash in it.

47:39So the temples were actively selling the sake or giving, maybe just giving it as gifts, but it was leaving the temple grounds for general consumption. Yes, it seems that way. Temples, you think about it, they have a lot of rice. They get paid in rents in rice. And so it's a really smart business scheme to take all that and turn it into a finished product that you can sell or you can give. and it takes a little bit of rationalization too because these are buddhist institutions and you're not supposed to technically hey you're not supposed to be drinking when you're a monk you're supposed to be contemplating your navel you're supposed to be praying uh how do the japanese monks get around this well the way buddhism works in japan it's kind of handing love with shinto the native tradition and shinto deities like to drink so you have to have alcohol for them.

48:39You have to have sake for them. And so it's better if you make your own sake, and then you can give it up as offering to the deities. And of course, along the way, you have to taste it yourself. And you make a lot. And so some of it you consume, and that's fine. They justified that. But then the rest you can give or sell. So some temples did quite well in that regard. Would the actual monks and priests of the temple be the ones making the sake? Like the Trappist monks making beer? Or is it more like they're bringing lay people in, or they're having the people who are paying the rent do it for them?

49:20No, I think it's the monks themselves, because it involves a lot of skill. And we know from their records that they're trying new things, trying to improve all the time. So So it's the same group of workers who are doing this, and they have lots of innovation. So the ones who innovate pasteurization, well, it could have been around earlier. I mean, from the historical record, it's hard to say, but definitely one of the earliest examples of pasteurization comes from these monastic records. Likewise, increasing the brew amount by having an initial batch of ingredients and then adding another batch of ingredients than a third batch of ingredients.

50:04That's something that the temples innovated. The way the temples did it, they would add the same amounts each time. When early modern secular brewers did this, they discovered you could double the amounts you added. And that's become the sort of standard for today. So they're very innovative. And we know that they drink a lot too. so if the monks though are are brewing you would imagine they would want to control that knowledge so how do how is knowledge shared or not shared between brewers before like get gay con kind of gets into that we're going to do scientific brewing and tell everybody in Kyoto how to do it yeah we have one good medieval brewing text and it has some one yeah and it has some recipes for different temple sake.

51:00And you kind of wonder how those recipes were obtained. Yeah, it's kind of a mystery, but I think a lot of the learning, it's by word of mouth in that period. So it's not well documented. But surely, you know, you have one temple monk might go to another temple to help establish brewing there. In some way, secular brewers learned about all this stuff in the early 17th century, and then it just proliferated. But yeah, it's kind of hard to know how to brew at that very high level because the knowledge is just not well disseminated. We have lots of cookbooks that are published in the early modern period.

51:47People could read those. They could borrow them from lending libraries. They could see, you know, what the shogun eats, you know, have a sense for that. But in terms of like brewing, there's two sources of information if you're an ordinary person. One is grandma, what she does at home, her doboroku. And maybe just maybe, you know, a contact at a professional brewery. But they're not printing up manuals on how to brew. Yet they're training people. So maybe if you do a summer, oh, excuse me, a winter at a brewery, you get a sense for how to do it and can take that knowledge elsewhere eventually.

52:27How available is sake then to like the average city dweller? Oh, is it something you can expect to have most days or? Sure. If you could afford it, you could go and sake is sold not in bottles. You bring your own container or you can get a rental container. and the brewery, the people who sold sake were really clever about this. They had a system like library books where they put the name of their shop on the bottle and a reference number. And you could check out that bottle and have it filled. And then you bring it back and you get it refilled. And it all depended on how much you wanted to spend, the type of quality of sake that you wanted and how much you wanted to get.

53:16But sure, yeah, sake is readily available. And if you could afford sake, you go to the local izakaya and you get doboroku. You get the white horse. Interesting. This is like a half-remembered thought from American history class in high school. But I feel like there was this comment that everybody was kind of like drinking beer all the time. Even kids were drinking beer all the time. And the explanation was a little bit of alcohol in your calorie rich liquid is a better thing to eat than kind of sketchy water. Oh, yeah. Is that also true in Japan in that consumption way or maybe not so much? I think the quality of water is much better in Japan than it is in a lot of countries.

54:00If it's the 19th century, I'd rather drink water from Edo than I would from London any day, you know. So if you're living in London or another city, what do you have to drink? Well, you could boil that water and make tea. Otherwise, you know, a weak beer works pretty well to keep you going. And I think, you know, people thought of Doboroku in the same way because Doboroku, when it's sold, it's watered down a lot. And so it's almost like an energy drink, if you will. you know um it's kind of a working man's red bull so to speak okay and so you'd have that and it kind of gets going in the morning and it's watered down to increase like the amount you could sell or is it watered down because it's like so thick and porridgey and hard to drink if it's not watered down yeah i think both i think on the seller's side they want to produce more so they're watering it down um and then yeah it makes a little bit more it looks it makes it easier to drink uh but that's always kind of like the the problem for selling sake is how much is it watered down um i read this one buddhist text from the medieval period and you think it would condemn sake brewing but it doesn't instead it condemns sake brewers who water their sake down too much and it says you do this too much you're going to go to hell and it provides a very graphic dante-esque description of what's going to happen to you if you're watering down your sake too much that's a very this worldly concern for a buddhist a buddhist text to have that's interesting so that was like an issue then is like adulteration or like kind of squeezing the consumer for the sake of the producer oh sure yeah i mean it makes sense in a lot of ways but you just don't want to do too much um in wartime people complained about the sake being too watered down and they called it goldfish sake because you know it's allegedly a goldfish could like live in it because there was no alcohol i wonder what it tasted like i'm sure i would not have tasted nice watery yeah very well because these days these days right we're going towards this lower abv style of sake is becoming more popular so it's kind of not for the same reasons but kind of going full circle right yeah well people you know the brewers are really trying to figure out how to appeal to to consumers in an age when in japan the united states people are drinking less alcohol than they ever did you know kind of talking about drinking more alcohol um what is if you know because this was not really mentioned in the book i'm just curious about it what is the history of like nomi hodai or like like the free flow culture of you go to a restaurant and like you just can drink into for the set time period when did you find anything that talks about when that shows up?

57:04Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Like all you can drink. We do have examples of drinking contests from the 19th century. And those are definitely all you can drink. And I've done some research about binge drinking historically, and it doesn't appear in this. It's going to appear in my book. It appears it's going to appear in an article that's coming out in this historical journal maybe next year and it's very interesting because what defines a good drinker in the medieval period is a lot different from what defines a good drinker in the 19th century in the medieval period it's not how much you can drink it's how much you can vomit basically because that's what that's what makes you the life of the garden when you're okay hurling your guts out and we see that in picture scrolls we read about it and people brag there's this aristocrat who can vomit on command and he's very popular right okay but fast forward in the 19th century people are drinking copious amounts of alcohol and here you have to wonder it must be watered down somehow because this would kill this would kill anybody today but they're drinking it and they're trying to remain absolutely cold sober you know at least according to the accounts none of this like wild behavior you know the most that's going to happen is someone goes tottering off and takes a nap someplace but they don't get they don't get so drunk that they get ill and get sick everywhere yeah that's passing and that's that's after like meiji and japan starts westernizing or that's still like latter half of the odo period Yeah, that's early 19th century, so not even this period of Westernization yet.

59:03And of course, why is this the case? And first of all, you have to preface it by saying this is kind of a limited look at society, looking at elite culture in the medieval period and early modern period. But why do people want to become sober like that or depict themselves as sober? And I think some of it has to do with the rise of Confucianism, which happens in the early modern period. Confucian ideas are taught in the local schools. And if you read Confucius, there's a famous line in there about how Confucius eats only a little bit, but he drinks a lot. Just he doesn't show that he's drunk. and i think you know there's that sort of mindset like you can have a drink and just as long as you don't show that you're intoxicated and we find that echoed in the literature that's written for samurai and we find it echoed in the in the health manuals of the period like a little bit of sake is good but don't drink to excess and so there's this desire to remain sober and if we also think about the repressive nature of early modern society you don't want to stand out so if you're going to get ripping drunk you do that and then you go into some corner someplace and have a nap or better yet you go home and have a nap in in the early modern period um like the the floating world the pleasure districts those were treated as like a place where you could get drunk Or even then, was it more it was still seen as kind of inappropriate, depending on who you were, like your background?

1:00:43It's more appropriate in those situations than others. Those are literally walled off parts of society where men go into and seek all kinds of pleasures. And so in that way, you're kind of in a liminal place. and so you just like a tourist today when you're traveling you kind of get up to naughty business you know that you wouldn't do at home you know what stays in vegas and what happens in vegas stays in vegas that kind of thing i think what happens in yoshi water stays in yoshi water or it should for those folks um so yes uh but but there are also times of great samurai ritual where people are obviously going to get drunk but they maintain that sober exterior um so for example say a lord was entertaining another very powerful official they'll start off with a sake drinking ceremony and the sake drinking ceremony will have nine cups of sake that they're each drinking and yeah i remember i remember this in the book um it's it to me it felt more like a contest than like a proper ceremony it's like i am going to drink you under the table and I'm going to make you get very drunk.

1:02:02Just watch me. I think there is that. There is that aesthetic of a contest. And can you keep up with me? Because it's a hierarchical relationship that they're reinforcing through this ritual. There's the host and the guest. And usually the guest is of a higher status. And so can they negotiate this relationship? And you do it through sake drinking. You do it by giving lots of nice stuff to your guest. give him a horse give him a sword and i think maybe there's a lot of yeah back and forth about is this person a real drinker or not can they can they hold their alcohol and later on could they vomit it up because we want to see that if it's the medieval period you know um so yeah unfortunately that kind of like contest part of it doesn't appear too much in that instance in those records.

1:02:55But there are drinking games in the medieval period that people played that we know about. So sake is especially today thought of as Japan's national drink, but Japan has a lot of relations with the Asian continent with various Chinese dynasties and things like that. And I know there's cultural influence. Is there alcohol influence as well there? Well, definitely in the case of shochu, that's easier to document. It seems like, you know, if we look at the history of shochu, it comes from the Mongols who bring that distillation project, distillation process, and they introduce it to China, introduce it to Korea, eventually to the Ryukyu Islands, and then to Japan.

1:03:43And simultaneously to, in the 16th century, Portuguese, Spanish are also bringing in wines and methods of fermentation. So that kind of thread is very clear. But in terms of the history of sake, it's really hard to say because, yeah, Chinese are doing lots of very interesting brewing, but how it's related to the early history of sake is rather unclear, at least according to the Japanese scholars. I mean, part of it is sake nationalism, but I also trust their reading of the sources because if it's a case of sushi, definitely, you know, you can see antecedents in China and it's very clear. But in terms of sake brewing, it's much less clear.

1:04:25What people are brewing in China before sake is like beers and things like that. But even in the ancient period in Japan, they're using lots of techniques that we don't really think about with sake brewing. They might be taking, they're malting, for example, and using that in sake brewing in some recipes. And they might be different. Malting the rice? They're using wheat. Whoa. So they're malting other grains besides rice because you can't malt rice very effectively. Oh. Yeah. So there's all kinds of like recipes that exist or sort of fragments of recipes that we get from the 10th century. And some of them have malting techniques.

1:05:08And they might use different types of koji, too, than are used in sake brewing today. So there's a lot of experimentation that's going on in that early period. That's interesting. So it's kind of like the craft beer and craft sake, the kind of not considered seishu Japanese sake legally, but like the other kind of brewed beverages that's going on now. Yeah. Are a little maybe closer to that in 10th century brewing style. Sure. People are using hops today in sake brewing. So it's stuff like that. And then brewing, sake brewing overseas, it begins in America? Or I suppose it begins in the Japanese Empire colonies outside the main islands?

1:05:49Right, right. And then the United States is the first place you see brewing? Yeah. I mean, that's where I found it in California. And that's more than a century ago when Japanese immigrants come. And they set up all kinds of Japanese industries, and some of them are sake brewing. Also in Hawaii, there's that tradition too. Yeah, almost every kind of major city along the coast in California has a brewery, one or more, that's run by Japanese immigrants. But unfortunately, that history gets kind of wiped away with prohibition and with the Second World War. and then it's not until the oh 1970s that it's revived again is there any like contemporaneous documents commenting on like the quality of those early american breweries compared to japanese breweries not in that period that i've read but it's interesting when the major players start opening breweries in the United States in the 1970s, Gekkekan is producing Junmaishu in the United States because it can't add any alcohol to its sake.

1:07:03And that's true today. I think almost all the sake that's brewed in America is Junmaishu. And Japanese journalists are coming to the United States and they're drinking Gekkekan. They're going, whoa, this is quite different from what we're getting in Japan, where we have this two-thirds sake that Gekekkan and other breweries are making. This is the real deal. And so they're very impressed by American sake. And they're like, how can I get this stuff in Japan? And you can't, at least in that period. People don't know what Jinmai Shu is in Japan. At least that term is not widely used. It's not used, yeah.

1:07:46so initially i think yeah american sake impressed people in the 70s and it still impresses and a lot of innovations that happened in sake brewing happened in the united states or or abroad like year-round brewing that's something that takes off in hawaii uh also in hawaii was carbonated sake that's introduced in the post-war period uh flavored sake is something too i think is an american invention that's been re-imported back to japan although you can't call it sake if it's got flavorings in japan yeah which is interesting in and of itself yeah no the the kind of back and forth between japan and america in all sorts of industries is very interesting but sake i think is seen as such a traditional or at least i see it as such a traditional industry that that's very interesting to kind of hear about how innovations or things that are happening in America then kind of filter back to Japan.

1:08:46And they're like, oh, maybe we should be doing that kind of thing as well. You know, tradition is a great thing. Those generations of tradition of brewing, you can't replace that. And that's something that Japanese brewers have. But then you get these guys and women in America who were involved in the culinary industry or maybe they had some IT job and they just developed this passion for sake. They're able to homebrew in the United States. And it's not easy, but you can do it, you know? And then they decided to make a go of it. And their minds are kind of completely open about what you can do with sake, you know?

1:09:27And also their consumers too. They don't know sake very much. they might have had some some hot piping hot beverage at a sushi restaurant once i think that's sake and so it's their job the brewer's job to try to say no that's not maybe the best example of sake try this try this flavored sake or try this um kimoto that i make and you know then people have that dialogue but it's it's it's really exciting you get that that growth and all this potential of people trying to reinvent sake. And some purists will say, oh, no, no, you can't do it that way. But yet if it's bringing customers in the door, what's wrong with that?

1:10:12I would say. That is the challenge, right? Of like, do you just keep it as this one thing that the modern world maybe no longer has a need for? Or do you grow and change and develop and expand? Yeah, and even the Japanese government, when it's trying to promote sake in the 1950s and 60s, they're offering it as a replacement for gin or vodka. And they're coming up with all these kind of cocktails for sake, for Westerners. So like sake cocktails were a big thing for a long time. You know, I mean, they still are for some. Some brewers have recipes on their homepages making sake cocktails. When does the like sake and wine association really start to become like linked if if the japanese government is kind of almost treating it as a distilled beverage in the 50s and 60s when does it change tack to be a little more like it's the it's the wine of asia yeah that's that's very recent you know that whole wine culture thing um and to give you an example of that i was working in a japanese restaurant in kyoto a nice place you know that was in the 90s and it was a couple place kind of a lower end kaiseki place but still you could spend a lot of money there you know you go to the chef and say i'm in your hands omakase shimasu and you could walk out a lot lighter in the wallet yeah yeah um but what are people drinking at that time he has two types of sake that he has available just two you know one with little gold flakes in it and another one and uh beer most people are drinking beer there's not that kind of conception of pairing at all um yet around the same time i'm going to wine events in kyoto and people are talking about pairing and pairing wine with food.

1:12:17And I think then there's this gradual permutation of wine culture into sake and this notion that sake is something that needs to be paired or can be paired with food. Historically, nobody thought that way. You just drank sake. You didn't think about pairing it with anything. You drank it before, you drank it after, during your meal. And nobody thought about it like that. People prefer beer because it's lower alcohol or they like the taste or it's a so-called modern beverage, some. But yeah, this whole idea of pairing sake with different foods is very recent. But it's very much on the minds of American brewers because they're always trying to push people to think of sake as not just for Japanese food.

1:13:04It's something for everything. Hot dogs, pizza. There's a sake out there for that. one brewer told me that makes sense yeah and it's true i mean why i mean wine you there's all these rules right red wine with meat and white wine and yada yada yada but sake it's kind of it's all out there it's all kind of good you don't like it at that temperature well change the temperature maybe it'll be better do you have a preferred sake temperature i mean i think it's depends on the on the sake really um i guess you know something more ethereal like a daiginjo ginjo kind of on the cooler side of things but something more fuchishu kind of warmed up and it depends on the time of year too and i i have to admit i'm not a sake connoisseur either uh the sake that's available locally is very limited um so uh i just you know get a bottle and enjoy it whatever temperature actually yeah yeah yeah i i think that's reasonable i think that's totally fine is are there this is kind of stepping back a little bit into the history again but um was there records of sake being consumed on dejima in nagasaki during the edo period on the dutch enclave on the dutch side yeah um the dutch brought their own alcohol and they brought beer, they brought wine and occasionally they would share these things out and apparently some Japanese who worked very closely with the Dutch developed to find this for wine and there's kind of a distribution network that develops amongst these people for wine I don't know if the Dutch developed a taste for sake they probably did drink it though but yeah they brought a lot of their own food and alcohol and they're doing they're making a western foods there they're baking and the like but even culinarily it's kind of separated and there's not a lot of necessary like sharing that kind of thing even right right oh interesting it's been quite a bit over an hour so thank you so much for hanging out and talking about the book and talking about Japanese history and Japanese sake history, especially taking all of my kind of odd, odder questions as well.

1:15:33But kind of maybe as a, as a final question, should I, what should I have asked you about? Well, first of all, I appreciate the conversation and all the questions that you have asked. Yeah. The thing about that, that I've learned studying the history of sake and history of sushi too, is that, and I don't know if this is a question or not, so I'll just make it as a statement. there's been so many changes. And what we think of as these iconic foods and drinks today, quite different just a century ago or even less than a century ago. And I think in knowing that, we can all of a sudden think about the potential for these different things.

1:16:20Because if our mind is like stuck, that sushi is this way and sake is this way and it's always been that way and always should be that way, then it's going to die, I think. It's got to evolve with the times. I met this chef in Japan and he had this restaurant in Kyoto that went back to the 17th century and he made one dish. He made this turtle soup, right? Okay, yeah. And, or spon, spon nabe. And I was really excited because I thought he was making this one dish for centuries in his family. And finally, you can get the taste of the Edo period, right? And literally, I believe this rumor that they used the same pots they had in the 17th century and they never washed them.

1:17:12But that was not true. But one of the things that he told me is that when I asked him this question, it's like, what is the taste of the 17th century? Or I said something crazy like that. And he said, well, actually, you know, every day the flavor changes. You know, I look at the weather. I look at the customers coming in. You know, I change a little bit just because food has to evolve. And if we kept it one way, then we would go out of business. And I think, you know, there's a lesson to be learned there. Here's this restaurant that goes back to the 17th century. There are marks on the door where the samurai were attacking it with swords because they couldn't get in one night.

1:17:52And yet, you know, he's kind of tweaking the recipe almost every day. And I think sake brewers too, they're changing and evolving the recipes. So sake in America is a little more acidic than sake in Japan. And it's just some brewers here are doing it in a more bolder fashion than others. But we all kind of have to grow and evolve. And that's not to say that we shouldn't keep these traditions too. They're very important. But at the same time, we shouldn't be fixated with them too. So things should change a little bit. Keeping the spirit of the tradition rather than maybe the law of the tradition.

1:18:28Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. And that's up for the master brewers and also for the wacky experimenters to figure out. Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. That's a great place to end it, I think. Thank you so much. Well, cool. I've enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. Your book, Kanpai, The History of Sake, is out wherever good books are sold. either as a digital copy or a hardcover copy. I'm sure everybody who is in Japan or outside Japan is excited to get it and read it. We'll put a couple links in the show notes to make it easy for people to find it as well.

1:19:03Awesome. Thank you so much for today. Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Sake on Air. We'll be back with a new episode very soon. But in the meantime, please take a moment to review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. As always, send your questions and comments to questions at sakeonair.com, or reach out to us on Instagram or Facebook at at sakeonair. Don't forget that we have a YouTube and a sub stack as well. Sakeon Air is made possible with the generous support of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, and is broadcast from the Japan Sake and Shochu Information Center in downtown Tokyo.

1:19:45It is produced by Export Japan, and our team is Shuso Imada, Justin Potts, Arlene Lyons, Cindy Bissig, Chris Hughes, Chris Pellegrini, John Gottner, Marie Nagata, Miho Ota, Rebecca Wilson-Bine, Sebastian Luan, and me, Frank Walter. Until next time, kanpai!