Ep 02: A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Sake Universe Part 1

Junmai, honjozo, ginjo, daiginjo... What do all these strange words mean? Do we have to know them to enjoy sake?  It will definitely help you to identify the sake types you like, to understand a difference between these incomprehensible sake bottles in a shop or exotic sake names on a wine-list, to decide what sake you should choose for a particular meal, or whether you need to pop the bottle in the fridge before drinking or it’s fine as it is and so on.
So let me be your guide in this vast and strange sake universe and you can decide for yourself whether you want to remember all this sake mumbo jumbo or just go easy and enjoy the drink.

Episode's Content:

• Variety of Sake
• History of sake classification
• Current sake classification criteria
• Futsushu
• Why do brewers add distilled alcohol?
• Premium/Special designation sake
• Premium sake is not always better
• Sake of the Episode: Dewazakura Oka Ginjo

Kampai!

Sake mentioned in the episode:
Dewazakura Oka Ginjo
Dewazakura Brewery
World Sake Imports UK
The Whisky Exchange
Sorakami

Sugidama Podcast on Podchaser - please review if you don't use Apple Podcasts

Music used:
Wirklich Wichtig (CB 27) by Checkie Brown https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Checkie_Brown_1005/hey/Wirklich_Wichtig_CB_27

Just Arround the World (Kielokaz ID 362) by KieLoKaz
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/KieLoKaz/Free_Ganymed/Just_Arround_the_World_Kielokaz_ID_362

Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Transcript

Episode 02: A hitch-hiker's guide to the sake universe

0:21

Greeting

Hey, everyone, my name is Alex. Welcome to the second episode of Sugidama Podcast, the podcast about Japanese sake, the drink so diverse that I don’t even know where to begin. So I will start with terminology. Be warned, this episode could sound a little bit technical, but please bear with me.

Last time we talked about sake myths and here and there I was casually dropping strange Japanese words like junmai, ginjo, daiginjo... And some of you might go Eh? What is he talking about? Honestly, I did the same when heard these words for the first time. They actually represent a sake classification system. And at the beginning, I kept mixing them up. 

Do you have to know these strange words? Tricky question. My wife, for example, never learnt them. At a wine shop, she would choose sake by the label on the bottle. If it looks attractive she would buy the sake. At a restaurant, she will just describe to a waiter or sommelier with a smile what kind of sake she likes and they would always suggest something nice.

For me knowing these terms is definitely very important. I am always curious about what sake I drink and want to know more about it. I like choosing a certain sake for a certain occasion based on a style or type, I enjoy trying sake I’ve never tried before. That's why knowing what all these words mean helps me a lot. 

It will definitely help you to identify the sake types you like, to understand the difference between these incomprehensible sake bottles in a shop or exotic sake names on a wine list, to decide what sake you should choose for a particular meal, or whether you need to pop the bottle in the fridge before drinking or it’s fine as it is and so on.

So let me be your guide in this vast and strange sake universe and you can decide for yourself whether you want to remember all this sake mumbo jumbo just go easy like my wife does.

2:46

Variety of sake

What fascinates me in sake is its simplicity and complexity at the same time. On the surface, all sake might look and even taste the same to you as it did to me at the beginning of my sake journey, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Sake is amazingly a very diverse drink. 

If you think about it, sake is made from four basic ingredients: rice, water and fermenting cultures – koji and yeast. However, the brewing process is very complex and to achieve this simplicity and complexity you have to put a lot of effort and knowledge. A look, taste and even a feel of sake depend on a wide range of brewing techniques, tricks and methods. The beauty of the drink is that you can get completely different styles of sake from the same ingredients. 

So it’s great fun to read how brewers use their skills to make sake taste and feel exactly how a master sake brewer (called toji in Japanese) wants it. For example, at certain stages they often use a stopwatch for precision: 10 seconds more and the sake could be very different. For me, the level of skills used in sake brewing is really impressive and I feel deep respect for the brewers’ dedication, skills, artistry and hard work used in making this delicious drink. And with 12 hundreds sake breweries still active in Japan many of each managed by toji with her or his particular brewing style you can imagine how diverse the sake universe is.

There are fruity sake, savoury sake, dry, sweet, peppery, crisp, light, full-bodied and many many more. It’s sometimes mind-boggling, how wide the range is. And again, they all are made using the same base ingredients without adding anything else. It’s really something.

But it’s not all. When you try sake for the first time you may think that what you are drinking is a typical sake which you usually get. And then you start hearing these strange Japanese words and realise that there are also sake types, grades, styles...

You can have just normal sake, or sparkling sake, which is something new in Japan, cloudy sake, unpasteurised sake, aged or aged in a cedar barrel sake. Or you can have table sake, special, premium, or super-premium sake. There are also several brewing methods used for making sake to add to the mix. And all these types, styles, grades, and methods create such an endless range of tastes and experiences that you can never be bored trying new sake.

5:51

History of sake classification

As everything in Japan, sake has its own official classification system based on the criteria we will talk about in a moment. But this system came into existence only in the end of the 1980s or the beginning of the 1990s. Before that, sake was divided into three classes: special or tokkyu in Japanese, first (ikkyu) and second (nikkyu). Breweries could submit their sake to the government’s inspectors, and they decided whether it was special or first class. Anything which couldn’t make it or was not submitted at all were a second class by default. 

The mark of the special or first class ensured the quality of sake (given that there were around 5 thousand sake breweries back then in Japan) and allowed the brewers to charge higher prices though paying higher taxes. The system was introduced after the war and worked fine given that sake that time was not particularly diverse. 

A few decades forward, and the competition from beer, wine and whisky high balls forced sake breweries to become more innovative: the industry saw the rise of junmai sake (I’ll talk about it in a minute), had so-called ginjo boom, the emergence of highly refined sake and a lot of other cool stuff. So by the end of the 1980s, the system fell out of favour with both, the brewers, who wanted more diversification and less arbitrary approach and the government, who wanted more taxes as they usually do.

So the new sake classification system, which we currently have (and which is now criticised by many sake professionals) was introduced in the 90s. While it’s been around for the last 30 years, I have met a few Japanese people who still thought that sake was classified into those old three classes. Well, I guess they were not big sake drinkers.

7:57

A quick overview of the sake brewing method

Currently, each sake could be defined by three dimensions: the first dimension is grades or styles, then we have types of sake and finally brewing methods. So let’s look at the first dimension in this episode.

To understand sake grades, we need to understand how sake is actually made and get a bit more technical. As I said, the sake production process is quite complex, so I am not going to overwhelm you with myriads of technical points, which might be fascinating for me but probably too much for you at this stage. I still remember how my head was spinning from all this technical stuff. So I will introduce it in small more digestible portions in the next few episodes and will take a deep look at the sake brewing process in a separate episode.

As I have already mentioned in order to make alcohol, you need sugar and yeast. Rice doesn’t have sugar but it has a lot of starch. And to convert starch into sugar, sake brewers use koji, a mould which invades rice and magically turns starch into sugar. So far so good?

However, a rice grain consists not only of starch. It also has proteins, fats, amino acids, minerals… All this good stuff adds some character to the drink but too much of it makes sake rough. Luckily for us, starch is usually located in the core of a rice grain especially in sake rice. The starchy core is called shinpaku, translated simply as a white core. So to get rid of unwanted elements, we just need to polish rice to the core. 

The extent a rice grain is polished is called a polishing or milling ratio in sake. There is a Japanese word for that but I won’t bother you with it for now. The polishing ratio number is a bit counter-intuitive. It means how much rice has been left rather than polished off. So if the polishing ratio is 90%, it means that 10% were polished off and 90% remained. If the ratio is 50%, half of the grain has been milled off. I’ll let you figure out for yourself what a 45% polishing ratio means. However, it creates this linguistic paradox (typical for Japan), when one refers to a higher polishing ratio, which is actually numerically lower. Like 50% is a higher polishing ratio compared to 60%. You see what I mean.

The polishing process has been used for centuries for sake making. However, before the 1930s, the rice was usually polished to 90%, which is basically your typical white rice. The process of rice polishing is quite delicate. Firstly, you can’t damage the grains. Broken or chipped rice grains usually can’t be used for sake brewing. Secondly, if during polishing rice becomes too hot, it will ruin the taste of sake. So you need special machinery to polish rice below 90%, which only widely appeared in Japan before the Second World War.

O how does the process work? Before the start, rice is weighed. Then the grains are lifted to the top of the polishing machine and dropped through the rotating wheel, which takes small bits of it and weighed again. Then the process repeats over and over until the wanted ratio based on the weight rather than size is achieved. The polishing process is quite slow. If you go too fast, you’ll get more broken grains and the temperature will rise too high. For example, if you need to polish rice to 50%, it usually takes 50 hours. More than two days of constant polishing. 

After the rice is polished it’s left for a few weeks to properly cool down. Then it’s steamed and cooled again. Koji is added to start the conversion of starch into sugar. Then more rice and water are added together with lactic acid and yeast to make a starter. Finally, all the rice and water, in stages, together with the starter are placed into a steel vat and brewing begins. The resulted fermenting mash is called moromi in Japanese. It looks very futuristic because of the foam formed on the surface and smells very nice especially if the rice is well-polished.

It takes a few weeks for koji and yeast to work in parallel(the multiple parallel fermentation from the previous episode, remember?) to convert starch into sugar and sugar into alcohol. When it’s done, the brewer might add some amount of distilled alcohol (which is also called brewer’s alcohol) to the moromi. We’ll discuss the reasons for doing it in a moment, but let me finish. The moromi then is pressed to remove rice particles, sake is filtered, pasteurised, diluted to 15-16%, bottled, pasteurised again, sealed, labelled and shipped to retailers and restaurants. So this is the sake brewing process in a nutshell. Mind I’ve skipped a few steps to make the process simpler.

13:30

Current sake classification criteria

So we now know how sake is made we can move to the sake classification. The current classification of Japanese sake is based on two criteria: the first is whether distilled alcohol has been added into moromi (the fermentation mash) before pressing and the second, a polishing ratio. 

Let’s start with the first one: the addition of alcohol. Historically and it started during the Edo period in the 17-18th century, the alcohol was added into moromi mostly to preserve it from spoiling. Mind that there were no refrigerators that time and given that alcohol content in sake is relatively low, raising the ABVa bit higher worked as a great preservative. The second reason was to adjust the flavour of the sake and we will get back to it later.

Then during the Second World War, when Japan was struggling with food shortage, sake producers were told to start adding alcohol in order to increase yield and use less rice. Distilled alcohol can be made of any grains like barley for example so it didn’t affect the food supply much. When the war was over, most of the sake breweries kept making sake with adding distilled alcohol. 

The situation started to change at the end of the 1960s – beginning of 1970s when several breweries decided to go back to the original method of sake brewing without using any additional alcohol. This type of sake is called junmai sake or junmaishu in Japanese. It’s translated as pure rice alcohol or pure rice sake made from just rice and water with the help of koji and yeast. There is a name for non-junmai sake, aruten, but to be honest I have not noticed that people use it extensively.

15:30

Futsushu

So having set the foundation we can now move to the classification itself. All sake is divided into 2 major categories: table sake and premium or special designation sake as it’s translated properly from Japanese. Table sake is called futsushu, which means just ordinary sake. Nowadays, it accounts for 60-65% of the sake market in Japan but its share is constantly shrinking. Futsushu is a non-junmai sake and its rice polishing ratio is usually 80-90%. It’s not strictly regulated as premium sake. Besides distilled alcohol, it may contain other additives to improve its taste but there’s no limit for how much of distilled alcohol and additives can be added. 

There’s a perception that futsushu is not a very good sake. Actually, it’s not that simple. I’ve come across a few very nice table sake and it depends on a brewery. Many breweries still make very good futsushu. However, it’s true that some futsushu are not particularly great. They might give you a headache and hangover. And cheap and not very balanced futsushu is probably responsible for a lot of bad experiences people had with sake. So if your previous encounter with sake was painful, keep listening! I am going to tell you about the premium staff!

17:06

Why to add alcohol

People often ask, why sake brewers still add alcohol. And in the case of futsushu, it is to drive the cost down. That’s why futsushu is cheap. In the case of more premium sake, the reason however is different. A lot of nice flavours developed during the brewing process are left in the rice after the sake is pressed. In order to draw these flavours out and keep them in the final product, brewers were and are adding alcohol just before pressing sake. Basically, it is a tool to adjust sake flavour and style. In premium sake, there is a strict limit of how much alcohol can be added to sake. It is 10% of the total weight of polished rice used in brewing.

17:55

Premium sake

So the more you polish the rice, the more refined sake you get as you achieve a higher ratio of starch to other elements. But it comes with a cost: you have to use more rice, because you polish off a significant amount of it, it takes longer to make sake, and you have to put more skills and effort to brew sake from highly polished rice. So it’s the main reason why sake with a higher polishing ratio is more expensive.

There are eight grades or styles in the premium sake category and they are based on the two criteria I’ve just mentioned: addition of distilled alcohol and a polishing ratio. There are four pairs of junmai/non-junmai sake based on a polishing ratio. Let’s look at them.

18:44

Junmai/Honjozo

The first pair of premium or special designation sake is junmai and honjozo. Initially, I think, the polishing ratio for both was set at 70% or higher (again less if we think numerically). However, the polishing ratio criteria was eventually dropped for junmai and it now can be any. It is usually around 70%. Junmai sake is usually more savoury and sweeter, while honjozo is usually more fragrant and dry, but it’s a huge oversimplification. I will do a separate episode on flavour and taste profiles of various sake grades and types.

19:26

Tokubetsu

The second pair is tokubetsu: you can have both tokubetsu junmai and tokubetsu honjozo. The word tokubetsu in Japanese means special and it could be anything. There are no special requirements to call sake special (sorry for the unintended pan). In my experience, it is often a higher polishing ratio, which takes the sake to the next category but it could be still honjozo or junmai in terms of flavour profile and style. So a brewer doesn’t want to mislead consumers in terms of what they expect from the sake they buy. Or the brewer can use different types of rice polished to different degrees for the starter and the main fermentation. Or it could be some seasonal variations. But basically, it’s junmai or honjozo sake with some twist.

20:24

Ginjo

The next pair is junmai ginjo and ginjo. I mentioned ginjo in the previous episode. It’s a special style of sake, usually with a fruity or floral aroma profile and very refined. The polishing ratio for ginjo sake both junmai and non-junmai is 60% or higher. In terms of flavour profiles, the difference is usually quite subtle. Ginjo sake tends to be more on the drier side while junmai ginjo – on a fruitier slightly sweeter side. But again it’s not that straightforward. Oh, another thing, which confused me in the beginning, ginjo is called just ginjo. So if there’s no word junmai in the name or on the bottle, it has alcohol added.

21:13

Daiginjo

The final pair is junmai daiginjo and daiginjo. Basically, daiginjo means super ginjo with a polishing ratio of 50% and beyond. I tried sake with a polishing ratio of less than 10%, meaning that more than 90% of a rice grain had been polished off. But there is sake with a 1% polishing ratio. In my opinion, it’s a bit of a gimmick to show off. It’s very expensive.

21:47

Summary of styles/grades

So here you are, eight grades or styles of premium sake explained and classified. Just to sum up because it’s a lot of information to digest: you can divide all sake into two big categories: table sake, futsushu, which is not strictly regulated and premium or special designation sake, which is regulated quite tight. Keep in mind that depending on the brewery, futsushu might be pretty good or not so good. 

Premium sake can be also divided into two big groups: junmai, which is sake made strictly from rice and water using koji and yeast, and non-junmai (sometimes called aruten), where a bit of distilled alcohol is added at the end of the brewing process to draw more flavours from the rice. Premium sake is also classified by polishing or milling ratio. 

The first level is sake which is junmai and honjozo. Junmai does not have any legal requirements for a polishing ratio, while honjozo is a non-junmai sake with a polishing ratio 70% or higher. The second level is tokubetsu junmai and tokubetsu honjozo typically should have something special in terms of polishing ratio, brewing method, rice and so on.

Then we have ginjo and junmai ginjo with a polishing ratio of 60% or higher and the most premium category is daiginjo and junmai daiginjo. The polishing ratio there should be 50% and beyond.

23:28

Premium sake is not always better

Now a word of caution and I have already mentioned it in my previous episode and I will probably keep talking about in the future. The higher grade of sake does not necessarily make it better or even more expensive. That’s why some people try to avoid the word “grade” and prefer to use “style” instead. You can have amazing junmai sake from a very reputable brewery, which could be much more interesting and more expensive than some ginjo sake.

This is the reason, why many people now criticise this classification. Some breweries are not interested in making ginjo style and want to focus on junmai sake but they find it quite difficult to persuade consumers that their junmai is better than some junmai ginjo and junmai daiginjo in the market. Especially, it’s hard outside Japan where we just assume that ginjo sake is premium and better. Not true!

24:33

Sake of the Episode

Now sake of the episode. This time I would like to talk about Dewazakura Oka Ginjo, a superb premium sake. As you can see (or hear) from the name, it’s ginjo, a sake made from highly polished rice with the addition of a bit of distilled alcohol. In this case, the polishing ratio is 50% meaning that half of the rice grain has been polished off. 

Dewazakura sake brewery is one of my favourite breweries and is located in Yamagata prefecture, which is quite famous in Japan for its focus on ginjo sake. Dewazakura is a relatively young brewery being founded in 1892. Interestingly, the founding Nakano family already had two sake breweries by the time they started Dewazakura. The name of the brewery comes from two words: Dewa, an ancient name of Yamagata prefecture and “zakura”, which is sakura, cherry blossom. For me, it sounds very fresh and delicate as cherry blossom petals. And it’s true for Dewazakura sake style.

Dewazakura brewery was one of the first in Japan to release affordable ginjo sake and it was Oka. Back then ginjo was still more like a trophy type of sake made for competitions rather than for the general consumers. Oka Ginjo was very well received, triggering the so-called "Ginjo boom."

So Dewazakura Oka is very delicate and fresh sake with fruity peach, pear and melon notes. On the first sip, it tastes dry and crispy, but as you drink it, Oka starts showing its sweeter side with flavours like honey, dry fruit and even a bit of honey melon. It has a lush creamy texture and a very rounded character. 

You can definitely have it on its own, it’s a pleasure to sip it with some nibbles like cheese, nuts or even cured meat. But is a perfect sake to have with sashimi or seafood in general. Its crispiness and freshness offset some oiliness in fish. Or you can have it with light dishes as salads, steamed chicken and so on.

If you ask me, Dewazakura Oka Ginjo is an ideal sake to try if you have never had sake before. You won’t be disappointed!

27:01

Ending

So that’s it for today. I’ll be back with more episodes. In the meantime, if you never tried sake, buy it and try. Please, send me an email or leave a comment about your experience. If you can’t find Dewazakura Oka, try a different Dewazakura sake, they all are just amazing, or any ginjo sake. Go to Sugidama Blog (which is a surprise, surprise, on sugidama.co.uk) and explore the Tasting Notes section. You can always find there a nice sake to try!

If you like the episode and want more, hit the SUBSCRIBE button, please leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. 

Thanks a lot for listening!

Kampai!