became “sake.” Another theory is that sa referred to the rice deity Sanaburi, while ke was an ancient reference to food.
In the late 16th century the Portuguese, the first Westerners in Japan, first documented the drink for the Western world, with an entry for saqe in a 1603 Japanese-Portuguese dictionary. The Dutch dubbed it sacki. In English, the drink has been incorrectly written “saki.” It’s also been written “saké” to differentiate it from the English word. Increasingly, it’s just “sake.”
By the late 19th century, when Japan was rapidly Westernizing, the word nihonshu (or nipponshu), which literally means “Japanese alcohol,” was used to distinguish the domestic drink from imported yoshu or “Western alcohol.” “Sake” typically means liquor in general. In spoken Japanese, nihonshu is commonly used for the drink that we call “sake,”
Sake is legally defined as being filtered from fermented rice, koji and water. Brewer’s alcohol is among the permitted additives; total additives cannot exceed 50 percent of the rice. The legal term seishu 清酒 (refined sake) is the modern term for filtered sake; this refers to all retail sake, even the cloudy stuff. Seishu is used in writing—on bottles, for example—but people don’t really use it in spoken Japanese.
This book uses the terms “sake” and, when necessary, “nihonshu” to refer to the drink.
The Difference between Sake, Wine and Beer
Throughout history, sake has been compared to both wine and beer, as well as with other varieties of alcohol. Westerners have always had a difficult time trying to characterize sake, because it truly is unlike anything in the West.
This late 18th century print is from a series pairing famous courtesans with sake brands.
This jug is Nagasaki’s traditional Hasami-ware porcelain from the mid-19th century.
In the late 16th century, the Portuguese defined sake as vinho, or “wine.” In Historia de Iapam (History of Japan), Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis recounted how sake was used in church services in Japan when wine was difficult to import. For the Portuguese, no doubt there were intrinsic similarities between wine and sake.
A line-up of Niigata sakes. The prefecture has over 80 breweries, the largest number of any prefecture in Japan. Niigata is the country’s third largest sake-producing region after Kyoto and Hyogo.
Wine associations continue to this day. The International Wine Challenge now has a sake category, and American wine critic Robert Parker reviews and scores sake. Wine terms, such as terroir, have been adopted into Japanese sake lingo (terowaaru). In some ways sake is like wine—both are enjoyed with food, both have a similar mouthfeel—though sake isn’t as acidic and dry as wine. But in how they are made, sake and wine could not be more different. In the winemaking process, grapes or other fruits are crushed to produce a naturally sugary juice. Yeast, whether wild or added, consumes the sugars and converts them to alcohol. Voilà: wine. Obviously, the quality of the grapes, as well as factors like maturation and the winemaker’s skill, determine the quality. Sake brewers often say that 80 percent of wine is the grapes, but 80 percent of sake is the brewer. (For whisky, between 70 and 80 percent of the flavor is from the cask influence during maturation.) Ranald MacDonald, one of the first Americans to arrive in Japan during the 1840s, compared sake to whisky, but this is inaccurate because sake is not distilled (a misapprehension that still persists). Since sake isn’t made from juice, it’s not a wine in the traditional sense. It is closer to beer in how it is made, which is probably why the US government now categorizes it as a beer. According to the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, “beer includes, but is not limited to, ale, lager, porter, stout, sake, and other similar fermented beverages brewed or produced from malt, wholly or in part from any substitute therefor.” (Confusingly, while the US government might tax sake like malted beer, as of writing, it requires sake to be labeled like wine under the Federal Alcohol Administration Act.) But there are key differences. Both are brewed, but unlike beer, sake isn’t made from malt. That hasn’t stopped comparisons to beer over the centuries. In the 17th-century travelogue The Travels of Monsieur de Thévenot, by French traveler Jean de Thévenot, sake was compared to beer. In the 18th century, the Encyclopedia Britannica defined sakki as “rice beer,” but added that it was “clear as wine and of an agreeable taste.” Beer is made from barley grain that is malted, a process in which the grains are encouraged to germinate so that the starches create enzymes. The malted barley is milled then heated in hot water, breaking down the enzymes into a sugary liquid called wort. Next, yeast is added, after which fermentation occurs, and beer is brewed.
This special beer is made with German hops, imported malted barley and local, top-grade Yamada Nishiki rice.
Completely different steps, however, must be taken to make sake (see pages 41–67). Rice is starchy, but it needs the help of mold—and humans—in order to be converted into alcohol. Sweet mold-covered rice called koji is made with rice and koji-kin, the Aspergillus oryzae fungus. While koji is often translated as “malt” or “malted rice,” this is not accurate. Malt, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “grain (such as barley) softened by steeping in water, allowed to germinate, and used especially in brewing and distilling.” Koji is rice that’s covered with microorganisms (see page 95). It is slightly sweet; with the addition of yeast, those sugars are converted into alcohol. Unlike beer brewing, which is a series of separate steps, much of sake making happens all at once. In the fermentation process unique to sake, which is called “multiple parallel fermentation,” production of sugars and alcohol occurs in tandem. The resulting brew is utterly unlike beer: sake isn’t malty, bitter or frothy.
Even though the comparisons have existed for centuries and continue today, sake is not rice wine (nor is it related to any distilled drink like whisky). It’s not rice beer, either. Sake is sake. There is nothing else like it.
The Scientist Who Made Barley Sake
The German bacteriologist Oskar Korschelt thought he could use his beer-brewing expertise to improve upon the centuries-old sake-making process. He arrived in Japan in 1876 and took up a teaching post at Tokyo University Medical School. But he did other work, from soil analysis to pottery making.
Korschelt felt the sake-making process took too long and should take place year-round. His answer was to ditch the rice. In 1878, he began expressing his desire to make sake from barley. In Japan there exists a small tradition of making a fermented barley drink with koji. According to the 1898 book Seisanfushi (A record of the western Sanuki realm), drinks were made from barley in modern-day Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku.
Korschelt believed using barley would be cheaper and faster than rice, reasoning that it would produce the necessary starch to make sake while omitting the complex koji-making process and the need for multiple-step brewing. In 1879, he did two trials: one batch with rice and barley and another batch with barley only. Both reportedly had tasty results, though the barley-only brew sounds like, well, beer. In his report, Korschelt declared that
