Sugidama Sake Podcast
Sugidama Sake Podcast
Ep. 31: Emergence of Sake Series: The Age of Prosperity: Sake in the Edo Period
The Edo period for sake brewing was like the Victorian era for the industrial revolution. So many things that happened then still influence the drink now: from technological advances and new brewing techniques to the geography and taste. In this episode, we are looking at the evolution of sake during the Edo period and the emergence of kimoto as a dominating brewing method.
Don't forget, Sugidama Podcast now has a sponsor, London Sake, an excellent online sake store. London Sake has one of the widest selections of premium and craft sake available online today. They deliver across the UK and Europe, and with over 100 sake from 25 breweries, there really is something for everyone.
Using simple online tasting notes and sensible, affordable food pairings they help you find the perfect sake without any of the fuss. Listeners of the podcast can get a 10% discount Listen to the episode to get the magical code! London Sake: making sake simple.
Episode's Content:
- The Edo period: setting up the scene
- How the centre of sake brewing moved from Kyoto to Hyogo
- Ikeda, Itami and Nadagogo
- Sakekabe: the end of year-round sake brewing
- Technical advances of the Edo period
- Kimoto method: it's not only about yamaoroshi
- Sake of the episode: Tamagawa 'Time Machine' Junmai Kimoto and Genroku Redux
Kampai!
Sake mentioned:
Tamagawa 'Time Machine' Junmai Kimoto
Kinoshita Brewery
World Sake Import UK
London Sake
Genroku Redux
Konishi Brewery Online Shop
Tengu Sake
Sake Deep Drive: Kimoto: Raising Wee Beasties
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/
Vocal: Svetlana
Episode 31: The Emergence of Sake Series: Sake in Edo
Greeting (00:20)
Hey, everyone! Welcome to Episode 31 of Sugidama Podcast, the podcast about Japanese sake, the drink which has been around for more than a thousand years. However, mostly took its current shape and form so to speak during the Edo period of 250 years of peace and prosperity in Japan. And today I am going to talk about it.
But before let me tell you about our sponsor, London Sake, which has one of the widest selections of premium and craft sake available online today. You can choose from over 100 sake from 25 breweries, and they will deliver across the UK and many European markets. And if you don’t know what sake to choose you can use simple online tasting notes together with very sensible and affordable food pairings to help you decide. What’s more, you can get a 10% discount by just using the code: SUGIDAMA (all caps) during checkout. London Sake: making sake simple.”
My name is Alex and I live in London, the United Kingdom in case someone wonders if it’s one of the other 23 Londons around the world. No, it’s not. I am a certified sake specialist, sake judge, sake educator and sake advocate. Besides this podcast, I have Sugidama Blog where I write about all things sake, and publish tasting notes, overviews, and information about sake events happening in London.
Let’s get straight to the point.
The Edo period: setting up the scene (02:02)
I think the Edo period had the same significance for sake brewing as the Victorian era in Britain for the industrial revolution. During that time, many brewing techniques that emerged in previous periods were refined and improved. In addition, many new techniques and methods were developed. And a lot of breweries we love today were founded during that time.
The main characteristics of the period were peace, stability and isolation. After 150 years of constant infighting, Japan was finally unified under Tokugawa rule, which continued for another 250 years. No wars, no fighting apart from conflicts between individual samurai. Things were getting better for everyone.
Contrary to a popular opinion that Japan was completely sealed off during the Tokugawa Shogunate, it is not entirely true. While most of the citizens were forbidden from travelling abroad and foreigners could not enter the country easily, Japan still maintained trade relations with China and Korea as well as with some other Asian countries and with the Netherlands. China and the Netherlands could use the port of Nagasaki. And there were a few daimyo, who could trade with Korea, Ryukyu Kingdom, which is modern Okinawa and Ainu in Hokkaido, which at that time wasn’t a part of Japan.
How the centre of sake brewing moved from Kyoto to Hyogo (03:47)
So what about sake? Let’s first talk about geography. During the Edo period, the centre of sake making moved from Kyoto and Nara to what is now known as Hyogo prefecture. The prefecture played always a significant role in sake making. If you remember the beginning of the series and Episode 25 in particular, I was talking about a man who found some mouldy rice in a shrine and made sake by using it? That story was from Harima no Kuni Fudoki, the ancient reports on provincial culture, geography, and oral tradition collected in the 7th-8th centuries. In this case, the records were from Harima province, which is the southwestern part of present-day Hyogo Prefecture. The site for this historic event is thought to be Niwata Shrine in the present-day city of Shiso.
But for centuries after that Hyogo prefecture played a less significant role in sake brewing, which at that time was mostly concentrated around imperial capitals, first Nara and then Kyoto. However, things changed after the capital was moved to Edo, the base of the Tokugawa family at that time. There are a few factors, which benefited Hyogo. First of all, the shipping route from that region was more efficient than from Kyoto.
Kyoto and Nara are located inland. So the breweries had to bring the sake they made first to Osaka or any other port and then ship it to Edo by sea. Hyogo prefecture is located on the coast, so it was much easier to ship sake from there.
Another reason was the taste of sake. Because of the difference in water: soft water in Fushimi in Kyoto and hard water in Nada in Hyogo (you might remember it from Episode 14 The Power of Water), sake from Kyoto at that time was sweet and rich compared to dry sake from Hyogo, which became more popular in Edo. Mind that sake during the Edo period was generally sweeter than now. And the third reason or probably, a consequence of the above, was technological advances in sake brewing achieved in Hyogo.
Ikeda, Itami and Nadagogo (06:38)
One of the most important technological discoveries that happened in Hyogo was the method to make sake clear. Before most of the sake drank in Japan was cloudy at best but often quite thick because of the rice lees left in the brew. The man who changed it was Yamanaka Yukimoto or as he was better known Kōnoike Shinroku. I was talking about him, the Konoike family and Itami in Episode 21, which was focused on nigorizake.
In brief, he was a son of a samurai who was killed during the Sengoku Jidai. So Shinroku decided to give up his samurai status, changed his name and became first a merchant and then a sake brewer. The legend of discovering clear sake goes something like that. An employee who was fired from the brewery for some reason decided to take revenge and spoil newly brewed sake by throwing ashes into it.
When the brewery workers tried to save the fruit of their labour by filtering it they got super clear sake because the ashes had bonded with the rice particles were left behind leaving a crystal clear drink which immediately became hugely popular. Another place famous for sake brewing in the early Edo period was Ikeda. It’s a town near Itami but in the Osaka prefecture now.
The sake from Itami and Ikeda was shipped to Kyoto, Osaka and Edo, the major cities at that time. In Edo, which was growing at a breakneck pace, sake from the Kansai region, was called kudarizake, where “kudari” means “go down”. The production of sake was growing fast.
However, both Itami and Ikeda were still quite far from the coast by the Edo period standards. Now you can probably get from there to Osaka in 20-30 minutes. But then it was quite an expensive exercise to deliver sake to the port from a brewery. So some breweries started gradually moving their production closer to the coast. The breweries ended up in five villages collectively called Nadagogo, "The Five Villages of Nada" including Nishinomiya, where the famous brewing water, Miyamizu, was discovered.
This region became known for its dry and crisp taste. There are 26 breweries in the area including such giants as Ozeki, Sho Chiku Bai, Sawanotsuru, Hakutsuru and Kiku-Masamune, as well as iconic Kenbishi. Together they currently account for 24% of the sake shipped domestically (source: 2020 Nadagogo Brewers Association), more than any other brewing area in Japan. But I guess, it’s a topic for another podcast.
Sakekabe: the end of year-round sake brewing (11:56)
Before the Edo period and for some time in the early Edo, sake was brewed throughout the year and had five main seasons: shinshu (new sake), aishu (sake brewed in the middle season), kanmae-zake also referred to as kanmae-sake (sake brewed before winter), kanshu (sake brewed in winter) and haruzake (sake brewed in early spring).
However, in 1657 the Japanese government introduced one of the first sake licencing systems called sakekabu, banning those who did not hold the certification from making sake. There were a number of reasons for the government to start controlling sake brewing through sakekabu.
First of all, the system introduced a ceiling for each brewery on the amount of rice that could be used for brewing sake in a particular year. Sake at that time was considered not a luxury product but a necessity of life, especially in northern regions, where people used it to warm up during winter. On the other hand, rice, the key ingredient of sake, was an essencial staple food for Japanese people and its yield was pretty much fixed.
Leaving to the free market, the situation could have developed in the way that smaller breweries would not have access to enough sake rice (called genryo mai in those days) while large breweries would be using table rice on top of genryo mai unbalancing the food supply. So through the sakekabu system, the government could control the rice consumption by sake breweries and make sure that small breweries have access to the rice they need for brewing.
The next step, taken by the bakufu (it is what the samurai government of Japan was called) was to limit sake making to one season, the winter, in 1673. One of the explanations was that the sake made during warm and hot months was more prone to get spoiled and therefore wasted. By that time, the technique of winter sake was well established in Itami in 1667 by improving the preparation of kanshu.
Another reason was economic. By limiting sake brewing to the winter season, the government made sure that farmers could work on their fields during summer and autumn and then work as kurabito at sake breweries during winter/early spring. Also by the end of autumn, the rice was harvested and the government knew how much of it it can allow for use in sake brewing.
This new sake-making regime also led to the emergence of toji as master brewers, who kept the knowledge of sake brewing methods and formed a team of brewers each winter to work on a particular brewery. Toji guilds also started to form at that time as well as sake merchants.
Technical advances of the Edo period (15:33)
The political stability largely contributed to economic development in Japan during the Edo period, which asl brought a lot of innovations into sake-making. First of all, the rice polishing technique was improved. If before the rice was polished manually using a large pestle and mortar-type utensil or even by people stamping on it, during the Edo period the breweries started to use waterwheels to power rice-polishing machines on a much bigger scale.
The sake pasteurisation also became much more common as breweries realised that heating up sake made it more stable. Another innovation was the addition of pure alcohol to sake to make it also more stable and achieve a particular style of sake. Taste-wise, sake was also getting less sweet. It was still one of the main sources of sweetness for people in Edo, but the pallet was changing in the direction of drier sake.
However, the main technological advance in sake-making was the emergence of a stable sake brewing method called kimoto.
Kimoto method: it's not only about yamaoroshi (17:55)
So kimoto was the first sake brewing method that produced consistent results. I was talking about it in more detail in Episode 4 but here I am going to look at kimoto from a point of view of the evolution of sake brewing. First of all, what is kimoto? We have to distinguish between kimoto as a method of sake brewing as we know it now and kimoto-kei, which could be translated as kimoto school which comprises various brewing methods.
Oh, by the way, if you are interested in the technicalities of the kimoto method, you definitely should listen to the episode of the Sake Deep Dive podcast, where Jim and Andrew are talking about kimoto in depth. I will put the link to the episode in the show notes.
The method was first mentioned in a 1687 sake brewing text, but it had existed before that of course. Kimoto became the main dominating method of making sake for 2-3 hundred years until the early 1900s when it was first replaced by yamahai and then by sokujomoto. However, kimoto never disappeared from sake brewing.
So from the technical point, kimoto, which is often translated as the “original method”, implemented the multi-stage brewing technique, which first appeared in bodaimoto but was developed further in kimoto. This multi-stage technique opened a door to large scale commercial brewing and made it possible to brew sake in large vats such as an 1800 litre jukkoku I mentioned in the last episode of the series.
So the main point here is the preparation of a starter, which developed a high concentration of yeast microorganisms, which are strong enough to kick off fermentation in a larger quantity of rice and water. However, this quantity was increased also in three stages in the period of four days and called sandan jikomi in Japanese.
So nowadays the kimoto method is associated mostly with the technique called yamaoroshi when brewery workers are mixing koji inoculated rice, steamed rice and water with long poles in a small vat to make the starter (moto or shubo in Japanese) for several days. The idea is to create a favourable environment for the growth of lactic bacteria, which in turn creates a lot of lactic acid and the lactic acid keeps all the unwanted microorganisms away from the starter. Pole mixing also improves the saccharification of starch into sugar.
However, historically the key characteristic of the kimoto method was the development of the starter at a lower temperature in order to suppress the development of yeast. The thing is that if the yeast is too active it will consume precious sugars which are better to use later in the brewing process. However, microorganisms are not very active under a low temperature, so macerating the rice and water mixture was needed to improve the development of the starter.
Of course, in the Edo period brewers could not control the brewing temperature during warm months, so this method could only be used in winter. The kimoto was first developed in the Nada region where winter brewing was pretty much a norm at that time. It was even known as kanmoto, where kan means cold.
By the end of the Edo period, kimoto became so ubiquitous, that had the name futsumoto, a normal or a usual method. Only when sokujomoto was developed and became a norm, kimoto got its current name, which means as I said earlier, the original method.
Sake of the episode: Tamagawa 'Time Machine' and Genroku Redux (24:09)
There are a few sake around that were made using recipes from the Edo period. So I am going to feature the two I know.
The first is Time Machine from Kinoshita Brewery made by Philip Harper. It is brewed following a method recorded in 1712 and it’s kimoto. Unfortunately, I do not have detailed tasting notes for it. I have tried Time Machine a couple of times before, once a few years ago when Philip Harper was here in London. But I never bought it (what I definitely should do).
However, from the limited tasting notes I have, it’s sweet and rich sake. You will definitely notice molasses, dried fruit and even a bit of soy sauce in the aroma. It’s sold as a dessert sake, but it might be a good food sake if you don’t mind the sweetness for accompanying rich meat dishes.
The polishing ratio is naturally very low, 88% as it was during the Edo period. SMV is minus 45 and you will feel it. As I said, it’s sweet. The acidity is also high, 3.0, which is a good sign of kimoto sake. And ABV is 14-15%. The sake has a very nice amber colour and it’s a joy to drink.
The second sake is Genroku Redux, which is a junmai sake. It’s brewed by Konishi Shuzo, which has been making sake for the last 460 years in Itami, the birthplace of clear sake I have talked about before. Genroku Redux was brewed using a recipe from an old book the family has in their possession and the recipe is dated back to 1703.
So the specs of Genroku Redux are somehow similar to Time Machine. The rice polishing ratio is 88%, the sake meter value is -35 and the acidity is 3.3. However, ABV is significantly higher: 17.8% as it’s a genshu, undiluted sake.
The brewery’s website states that this sake is made with only half of the water used in modern brewing methods. It doesn’t say anywhere that it’s kimoto so I assume it’s not. Though, the acidity is quite high.
Genroku Redux has a golden colour and a full bouquet of aromas from figs, liquorice and coffee to soy sauce, cinnamon, marmite and even a bit of a roast. It’s a full-bodied sake, sweet and smooth with dried fruit flavours and full of umami. Similar to Time Machine, you can enjoy it on its own or with rich food like pork belly, oily fish, prosciutto or cheese (or both).
If you are interested in how sake tasted in the Edo period, try either Time Machine or Genroku Redux.
Ending (28:47)
That’s it for today. I’ll be back with a final episode about the evolution of sake and a few very interesting interviews. In the meantime, buy Time Machine or Genroku Redux and try it. Time Machine is available at the London Sake website where you can get a 10% discount by entering SUGIDAMA all in caps at the checkout. And If you like to buy Genroku Redux, go to the Tengu Sake website, I’ll put the link in the show notes.
If you have any questions or suggestions about any sake topic, just drop me a line. My email address is alex@sugidama.co.uk or you can tag me on Instagram or Twitter @sugidamablog in one word.
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Kampai!