How to Make Traditional Japanese Sake

Travel to a remote corner of rural Japan, to one of the last Japanese family-owned breweries still making sake the traditional way.

It’s harder than it looks. You need exceptionally pure water, special sake rice, koji mold, yeast, and a secret ingredient. The technology is 2000 years old.

Here's how they do it:
• Wash rice, pour it into a bag, and soak it in cold filtered water.
• Drain it overnight
• Cook it in steamer under pressure (rice must be firm on the outside but soft in the center)
• Separate and cool rice, then spread it out and cover it with mold spores (Spores turn starch into fermentable sugars).
• 48 hours later koji – sweet rice – is ready.
• Mix steamed rice with koji, spring water, and yeast (Yeast consumes sugar and produces alcohol. This takes about three weeks).
• Pour it into cloth bags and press it. This squeezes liquid sake out of the bags.
• Sake is aged for up to 4 months.

Category: Travel

[Devonimp]

The best part of this for me is the huge leap that guy takes to yank the rice up to his coworker.

[meguru]

Wait.
That's just exactly how we make "tape ketan" in Indonesia. But we don't drink the water, we eat the fermented rice. And we let the alcohol evaporate.

I wonder if they just dump the rice afterward. If so, they should just send it to Indonesia. We'll be glad to receive it. ^^

[foolytricks]

A nice short, yet comprehensive documentary. 👊

[Zentao]

This was beautiful and I would love to spend a year working in their Brewery❤

[akakerness]

I would love to work in a place like that.

[johnnickson]

This is quite similar to rice wine called zutho of nagaland(but we soak the rice overnight and let it dry under moist tropical heat thats where they gets some mould and then pound it to powder. But we have many ethnically diverse tribe and more than 10 to 16 methods of making rice wine, and all have different taste, aroma and alcohol content(one such method is creating a charcoal of rice husk without burning it and mixing it to the boiled rice). We are able to achieve these because we have huge variety of sticky aromatic rice found no where else on earth (eg are black rice, joha rice, bamboo flower rice which only recently came out to the world)I can understand by seeing how Japanese are able to get flavor in sake by letting a mould in rice first. This indicates that flavors and aroma is very important in rice wine making. I wish that Japanese comes and learn the art of making different rice wine from my region in northeast india. It would help not only in preserving but world will come to know of it

[impulseki]

This reminds me of a studio ghibli film irl

[motivationalmadness]

Would you call yourself an "adventurer"? Do you believe that the idea of it still exists in this chartered and learned world?

[lolstillshane]

Actually, sake used to be made my female children mixing the rice with saliva in their mouths and then spitting it out.

[xavierpaololedesmamandreza]

So I guess Smoking isn't allowed there.