Back to Basics: Sake Ingredients, Classifications and Production

0:21Hello, everybody, and welcome to Sake Revolution. This is America's First Sake Podcast. I'm your host, John Puma. I am from Sake Notes. Also run the internet Sake Discord as well as Reddit's r slash sake community. And I'm your host, Timothy Sullivan. I'm a sake samurai. I'm the director of education at the Sake Studies Center, as well as the founder of the Urban Sake website. And John and I will be here tasting and chatting about all things sake and doing our best to make it fun and easy to understand. Well, hello there, Tim. Hey, John. Good to see you. Likewise. How you doing? I think this is the last episode of the year for us.

1:01And how's your sake year been? It's been very good. Busy, and I've been teaching a lot of sake classes, tasting a lot of fun sake, a few trips to Japan, and it's been a great and fun sake year all around. How about for you? Same here. Had a wonderful time. Ended up going up to Boston for sake day, which was a lot of fun. Did I just the one trip to Japan though? You're way ahead of me on that, but it was nice to see you there, which was a lot of fun as well. Yeah. Great sake year all around and really excited about what you, very much a Tim driven concept today, what you put together for today, what you wanted to do.

1:41And I think it's a really fun thing and I'm super excited to, to get rolling with it. So why don't we talk about what you're doing? Yeah, I teach classes all the time. I've heard that. Yes. And it's a lot of fun. And I love meeting people who are just new, just getting into sake, just starting their sake journey. And a shameless plug, but one thing I do is I always recommend our podcast. And I realized that, yeah. And, you know, it's good for people to listen to if they want to get into sake tasting or learning more about different aspects of sake. But I was thinking about it, and we've been doing this for five years now.

2:21We started in 2020, and I was thinking we haven't really gone back and revisited the basics. So I thought that it might be fun to do one episode around five years in that kind of capsulates all the learnings we had about the basics of sake. So if you find our podcast more recently and you want just a quick primer into what you need to know about the basics to start to dive in and enjoy sake, I thought that would be a really fun episode to make. Just a quick overview of what the basics are, how to get started, and get your feet wet in sake, so to speak. Sounds good to me, getting my feet wet. I think that like when we started this show, we did a series on a lot of the intricacies of making sake and that big overview.

3:17And it's fun to return back to these ideas and to go over them again for folks who have, who were not with us at the beginning and haven't gone back and listened to the first few episodes. I also think that you and I have probably matured as hosts in that time. And I think that maybe the product that we put out today might be better than what we did five years ago. I feel like a very well-matured host. Oh, good. All right. Like a good piece of cheese. I'm well-matured. Yes. Piece of cheese. I'm glad, Tim, that you are a good piece of cheese. Yeah. That's the other. You make a really good point, John, because when I would refer people who are just beginners and I'm like, oh, I do this podcast about sake.

4:03I'm like, oh, you can start at the beginning. And I realized that we broke up so much of the Sake 101 stuff over multiple episodes. So if you want to learn about sake ingredients, you basically have to listen to four episodes to get the whole picture. So I thought, why don't we do a quick summary of the basics you need to know? This is our back to basics episode. So if you're just getting into sake and want a quick primer, this is it. So I think we should dive right in. That sounds good to me. Yeah. So John, you're going to help me. You're going to be the man on the street as usual. Hello. Nice to meet you.

4:44So man on the street. I've never met before. Yes. Who's this man? I think one thing that is really important to start with, and I thought about a lot about the progress of these topics. When someone asks you at a cocktail party, give me the five-minute rundown, what is sake? I've gotten that question before, and I always start with sake ingredients. What goes into sake? John, you know the answer to this, so tell us, what are the ingredients in sake? That's funny you should say that, because just so I don't forget, I actually have it all printed on a t-shirt. So it is water, rice, yeast, and koji.

5:20That's right. And I think water, yeast, and rice, we don't have to go into too much detail. I'll talk a little bit about rice in a second, but the one that is most unfamiliar to most people is koji. I agree. I think that's the one that throws people for a loop. They're like, okay, I know what rice is. I know what water is. I've got an idea about yeast, but what is koji? Yeah. So koji is a type of mold and it gives off an enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar. So this is how we get sugar out of the starches in rice. And the analogy in the beer world would be malting grain. So if anyone has a concept of what malt is in the beer, the idea of breaking down starch into sugar in the sake world, we do that with this fungus called koji.

6:10and that's we don't need to dive any deeper than that just understand that koji is a way that we get enzymes into the mash that break down starch into sugar and we need that sugar so that the yeast can convert sugar into alcohol so that's our two-step fermentation that we have with sake yeah whenever people ask me like oh like why koji like why is not just doing it and where do you think the sugar is coming from because you need sugar to make alcohol and there is no sugar in rice. So you need something that's going to change that. And that's what the magic of koji is making sugar where there was none.

6:47Yes, exactly right. And the only thing I want to say about rice is that we have some specialty strains of rice that are specific for sake making, and they have a unique characteristic to them. Do you know what that is, John? So the important thing about sake rice is that all of your starches are towards the middle. That's right. Towards the center of the rice grain. Yeah. So we call that shimpaku or the white heart and it's a starchy core. So sake rice has this starchy core and that's so important because it allows us to mill the rice and isolate the starch in the center. So milling or polishing down rice is one of the key cornerstone concepts in sake.

7:31The smaller you mill the rice down, the more premium and the more expensive the sake is going to be. So that's another point I always mention when I'm giving people the quick overview of sake rice is milled or polished before brewing. And the smaller you mill the grain, the less of the grain remaining, the more premium and the more expensive the sake is going to be. Because you're losing part of the product when you're milling it down. If you have 10 kilos of rice and you mill it down to 50%, you have five kilos of rice and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, if you mill it down to, oh, let's say 75%, you have that much more to work with.

8:14Yeah, that's exactly right. And that takes us to the next topic, which I think is important, which is sake classifications. And this is a little bit more complicated, but I like to explain that the smaller you mill the rice, the more premium your sake can be considered. And we have classifications that are based on the milling ranges. Junmai is the entry level to premium for the pure rice style. And then we have Junmai Ginjo. That's the middle grade of premium. And for that, the rice has to be milled to 60 % or less remaining. And then for the super premium sake, that's called Junmai Daiginjo, and that is 50 % or less remaining.

8:56Those are the three grades on the Junmai style, and those are sakes that are made with rice, water, yeast, and koji only. So that is a good place to start if you're just getting into sake. Okay. Now, wait a minute, Tim. I know for a fact, I've heard from people, other people on the street, that there's another kind of sake where there is another ingredient, and that is a neutral spirit. What's that all about? Yeah, there's another chart of classifications, which exists in parallel to the Junmai styles, and that's called aruten, or alcohol-added sakes. And these sakes have an optional fifth ingredient, which is jozo alcohol or brewer's alcohol.

9:42It is a neutral spirit, as you mentioned, and that is added on the last day of fermentation. And it can affect the flavor, texture, and aroma of the sake. So for beginners, all you need to understand is that some sakes have distilled alcohol added, and this is called the alcohol added style. And some sakes are considered pure rice, and they don't have that added alcohol. And these two systems exist in parallel, and one is not considered more delicious or more premium than the other. They are both very delicious styles of sake. And you just need to be aware that some sakes are in the junmai category, and some are in the alcohol-added category.

10:23Now, wait a minute, Tim. We're adding alcohol to my alcohol. Is that going to make it higher in alcohol? that's perfectly logical and i hear that all the time but most sake has water added to it at the time of bottling so they can bring the alcohol level down whether it's the alcohol added or the pure rice style okay yeah and let me quickly just mention the classification names for that alcohol added side the entry level to premium is called honjozo that's 70 or less remaining a little bit different from Junmai. And then we have Ginjo, that's 60 % or less remaining. And then Daiginjo, which is the super premium, 50 % or less remaining.

11:02If you would like to see a chart of these classifications, just visit our show notes at sakerevolution.com. Great. Now, my understanding though, is that there's sake that is milled way down much further than 50%. Is that still just called Junmai Daiginjo or Daiginjo? Yeah, you can mill or polish your rice down well below 50 % remaining. There's sake made with rice polished down to 35 % remaining, 23 % remaining, 7 % remaining. And there was almost an arms race in the sake world a few years ago. How low can you go? Yes, I used to call that stunt semi-buhai. Stunt. Like, hell, this one is 6%. It's like basically dust at that point.

11:50Yeah. So my advice to people just getting into sake is don't chase the milling rate. Just experience the sake. Yeah. Experience the sake for what it is. And you're going to find styles that you like, that you jive with. And the milling rate is interesting supplementary information. And it's good to know what differentiates honjozo from a daiginjo. but it shouldn't lead you necessarily as your very first consideration when picking a sake. I agree wholeheartedly. I think that's something that people get wrapped up in all the time. Yeah. And when you're learning about sake, you want something to grab onto.

12:29You want something to guide you. And the milling rate, it's a number that you can focus on. And I understand it's only natural to want to find a number and say, okay, this is what I have to get the most polished. But it's really not a recipe for getting the best sake you can get. And maybe at one point it meant a little bit more. But I think that these days, the technique that we have, that brewers have, they can do so much without having to make something ridiculously well polished. Even though we talked about that alarms race that took place not that long ago. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting aspect of sake, but it shouldn't be the thing that guides all your decisions about which sake to drink.

13:15In addition to the ingredients and classifications, I want to give a really brief outline into how sake is made. And this is just a quick overview. we basically take rice, we wash it, we soak it, we steam it, and then we take that rice and we do a fermentation starter to get the fermentation kicked off. This is a small batch of sake that takes about two weeks to make. In the tank, we put in water. We put in the koji rice. That's that rice with the mold grown on it. We put regular steamed sake rice and we put all the yeast in on the first day. And this small mini batch of sake is our starter. And that takes about two weeks.

13:59And when that is done, we transfer the starter to the large sake tank. We add more water, more koji rice, and more regular steamed sake rice. And then that ferments for about an additional 25 to 30 days. And that's the main mash. And what's happening during that time is that starch is breaking down to sugar, and then the yeast is in there to eat the sugar and make the alcohol. So it's a two-step fermentation process that is unique in the world of alcohol. It's really cool when you slow down and study it a little bit. But that is how we get the alcoholic fermentation, starch to sugar to alcohol.

14:36And then when we're done with the fermentation, we press the mash. It gets pasteurized, bottled. We add a little water, and then that sake is ready to go. Excellent, excellent. How long are we talking from end to end here? It depends. There are some periods of sake making, like after pressing, you can age between three to six months. Some breweries do that religiously. Some skip that if they want to release a fresh batch. So anywhere from two to three months generally is the timeframe you're talking about from beginning to end. Okay. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And then the only other thing I would mention is that there are a variety of sake styles beyond the classifications, depending on different choices you made during the sake production.

15:29And I think there's a few we should talk about real quick. The first one that I get asked about all the time is nigori sake. Yes. Yes. Yes. So a lot of customers call this unfiltered or cloudy style. We don't say unfiltered on this show, but it's technically not unfiltered. It's coarsely filtered, but little bits of rice starch from the mash get into the final product and make it cloudy. That's a really popular style. And the other one I want to mention very quickly is nama sake. What is nama sake? namazake is sake that has not been pasteurized which means that it is still active in the bottle it's still a lot more subject to change as far as flavor goes and you've got to care for it a little bit differently definitely a little bit more than you need to take your regular sake care so generally speaking with sake most sake is relatively shelf stable although we do always recommend putting it in a refrigerator and keeping it in the dark.

16:30But with Nama, we strongly recommend that you put it in a refrigerator and keep it away from light and keep it in the dark. Tim, did I sum that up pretty well? You're hired. All right. Yeah. So Nama, as you said, is our unpasteurized style and it does need to be refrigerated, but you can get rewarded for that extra effort by having something that's really juicy and fresh and very zingy and zippy. And two other kinds I want to mention real quickly are kimoto and yamahai. These are styles that use an old school yeast starter method, and these produce more earthy, funky, and bold umami-driven sakes traditionally.

17:11Kimoto, yamahai, nama, and nigori, these are all styles that you can look out for. And these styles are based on production steps, so they're separate from the classifications we talked about earlier. So you can have a Junmai Nama, you can have a Junmai Daiginjo Nigori, you can mix and match these based on what the brewery's producing. That's another thing I'd like to point out is the difference between classifications, that's rice milling and ingredients, and the styles. Those are production steps that affect the outcome of the sake. All right. A sprint through the steps of what is sake, a sprint through the basics of sake, just as promised.

17:54And I think that you should be rewarded for your efforts by getting to sip some delicious sake. Yeah. So you and I both brought a sake. So the brief was if you were going to introduce someone to sake who was just getting started and going to hear this 15, 20 minute introduction, let's bring a sake along to taste with them. Right. And is it all right if I introduce the sake I brought? Absolutely. Yeah. So I brought a bottle from Brooklyn Kura. So this is a domestic sake and this is made right here in New York City. The one that I brought is one of the new Brooklyn Kura Junmai sakes. This is called Tidal.

18:33It's made with a hundred percent Calrose rice. That's a domestically grown eating rice that's grown in California. And the polishing rate, the amount that they milled this down is 50 % remaining. the alcohol percentage is 17 and the sake meter value is plus three and title refers to the ebb and flow of the tides and the connection between the earth and water and junmai is the entry level to premium and it is a great place to start when you're introducing people to sake i love to taste them on a Junmai. It introduces the concept of pure rice sake. And this is one of the entry-level classifications.

19:20And it gets people grounded in sake and gives them a great first introduction to the pure rice style. So that's why I chose the new title from Brooklyn Kura. Excellent. I like that. And what do you have, John? so i have something it's a little bit new to the states but it is a sake that i always recommend whenever somebody's oh what should i'm going to japan what should i try and i always say if you see this sake you should definitely have it because i think it's a great and a great intro sake i think that it's a it paints a wide paints with a wide brush we'll say so this is the macho King Yamada Junmai.

20:01Now, we talk a lot on this show about sake rice varieties and Yamada Nishiki is the most popular sake rice that's made, that's used in Japan for premium sake. And so king, it's sometimes referred to as the king of sake rice, so King Yamada. This is from Makino Sake Brewery in Gunma. It's apparently the oldest sake brewery in Gunma. Yamada Nishiki is milled down to 80 % of its original size. So it's a little less polished than usual. The acidity is 1.7 and the alcohol is 15%. That's great. Yeah. Tim, why don't we get that title in a glass? Yeah. So one thing I want to point out, John, is that the milling rate on your sake and my sake are very different, but they're both sold as June maize.

20:51That is absolutely true. Mine is 50 % remaining, which we mentioned was the threshold for Junmai Daiginjo. But one thing about this classification chart is that you're not required as a brewer to move up to the highest level you qualify for with your milling. So the brewers can choose to, once they meet that minimum requirement, they can choose to sell it in whatever of the classifications they feel best identifies their sake. So if it's usually more rice forward, more structured, they may sell it as a Junmai, even if it qualifies as a Junmai Ginjo or beyond. You have an 80 % milling rate, which is very rustic and very full-bodied, especially for Yamada Nishiki.

21:34And I have a 50 % on my Junmai. So keep that in mind. Again, we can't be slaves to the rice milling percentage. No. I like that we brought that up earlier, that the rice milling percentage really needs to be something you don't marry yourself to. Yeah. Okay. So I've got my title. I'm going to get it in the glass. All right. I'm going to get my macho in the glass. Macho. What a great name. It is. And when you look at the show notes, please, please do. These labels are, it's like a cartoony graphic of a, of an, of an older man flexing. And in this case, because it is the Amada, he has a crown because he's the king.

22:12The king. All right. I have my title Jun Mai in the glass. I'm going to give this a smell. So the aroma is relatively light here. It's not super strong, a little more reserved, but it is rice forward. And if you think about Kel Rose, it's actually an eating rice that, you know, is used a lot in the States. And you get a little bit of that hint of rice aroma. It wouldn't be Brooklyn Kura if there wasn't a hint of some fruitiness as well. So it's a good blend of a gentle, very light tropical fruit and some riciness. How about Mr. Macho? Mr. Macho is fruity. The aroma is very like pineapple, like a tropical fruit with a little bit of acidity, a little zing to it.

23:03And it's a really lovely aroma. the aroma on this and then we this is a junmai as mills 80 but the aroma i get on this it's a little bit more like a junmai ginjo even though in and your sake i would say is has that 50 percent milling but where do you think when you do the aroma on that what do you think that would be if nobody told you what they were marketing it as yeah i would never mistake this for a junmai that Ginjo, I don't think, because it is not super expressive in the aroma. It's more reserved and straightforward and a little ricey. And my mind goes to Jun Mai just based on the aroma alone.

23:45Right. And for me, based on this aroma, I would never think this was a Jun Mai. I would think it was something more elevated. Yeah. I'm going to give mine a taste. Please do. Again, the title from Brooklyn Currow. Yeah, so this has good structure. Definitely rice forward. Again, just that back note of something fruity and a little bit juicy, but really good balance with the acidity. I think the rice story, the cow rose, comes across in a very elegant way. This feels, as we often say on this podcast, this feels like a very food-friendly style of sake. This is a bottle you could so easily open when you have friends over for dinner and you just want something easy, clean, balanced to sip on with pretty much any kind of food.

24:32Like this feels like a sake you could pair with such a wide variety. Lovely. Very cool. Yeah. And the SMV is a plus three. So this is a really good balance between sweet and dry. It's not bone dry, but it's not super sweet either. It's striking that really good balance that brings roundness to a junmai sake. And as Brandon does so well, the rice flavors from the kalros are so well integrated. So great all around, super easy drinking. Excellent. And that's Brandon Dawn, our friend of the show who has been on many times. He's the toji over at Brooklyn Kurwa. Yes. Okay. That's right. All right. Now I'm going to sip on the macho King Yamada junmai from Makino Sake Brewery.

25:24So the body on this is, is significant. Like it is, it is a little on the thicker side and the flavors are your tropical mix. You've got some pineapple. You've got some, I don't know if I would say not so much melon in this case, but maybe some apple also and, and some banana. I think in a former life, I would maybe have said some circus peanuts, but I don't do that anymore, but definitely some banana here. and there is a fun little bit of effervescence. It's not sparkling, but it's a little bit fizzy, a little bit fizzy. And that is very pleasant to me on the tongue. And it helps to keep that full body nature from being too cloying and too thick.

26:08So very nice, very drinkable. This is, oops, I accidentally ate the whole bottle. Kind of sake for me. Very easy drinking sake. So if you ever get an introduction to sake from Man on the Street John Puma, you can expect some tropical fruits in there. I think that's the takeaway. Absolutely. Absolutely. If Man on the Street John Puma ever tries to introduce sake, you best be ready for some tropical fruits. Awesome. I think we hit a new land speed record in introducing sake. I think so. I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, but I really firmly believe that it was a good idea to do this episode and give people a episode we can point to that say, do you want a 20 minute introduction to sake?

26:56This is the episode. And I'm so glad we circled back and went back to basics for today. Me too. It's a lot of fun to go back to basics. I'm not going to lie. Sometimes it's a little bit challenging coming up with new episode ideas all the time. So going back and redoing concepts that we've done in the past, but doing it through the lens of things we've learned over the years is, I think, a lot of fun. Yeah. And one last thought I'll leave you with, John, is that people listening to this who maybe who are in the industry and who are experts, the majority of people out in the world have zero knowledge of sake.

27:32So I think having this information out there is really important, but the fun really comes in. If you get intrigued by any of the aspects of sake that we talked about, there is an unlimited well you can tap of learning and tasting and exploring. So this is really for all those people who are just getting started. You can consider this like a springboard to like dive into whatever. If you're intrigued by the concept of rice milling, you can explore there. If you heard the word nigori and you're like, what's that all about? You can explore there. We talked about different rice varieties. You can start tasting those.

28:08So that's one thing that got me really into sake as a hobby in the beginning was learning that there's so many aspects and you can explore all of them in different ways and your own timeline. And that's what made sake really compelling and interesting to me. So I hope that will be true for others as well. If they listen to this episode and start tasting different things. I think that's great. And for me, it was, I had a very similar thing where you dip your toe in, you start to learn a little bit and you're like, I'm just going to learn the things, the basics. And then you realize there's no end.

28:42If you expand out what basics mean, you can be educating yourself for years on that idea. That's really a lot of fun. They hook you in with the, oh, it's just water race, yes, and koji. But then there's so many little things that it's fun to learn about. That's the best part about sake education for me, is that it actually is a lot of fun. I enjoy it. It is a lot of fun. Over the years, I've realized that sake is not going to be the favorite drink of everyone who tastes it. But for those people who catch the bug and they become passionate about sake, it's so wonderful to be a place where people can come and listen to more about sake, listen to some tastings and dive a little bit deeper into different topics.