something that tastes good. How do brewers do it?
The saying sake zukuri banryuu means “ten thousand methods of making sake.” Throughout Japan, sake makers put their own spin on the process. Even within the same region, there are differences that come down to rice polishing ratios, yeasts, or fermentation times—all resulting in varied sakes. Heck, significant variations can be found between breweries on the same street! But the basic brewing framework is largely the same everywhere.
The process of making sake is a seemingly endless series of choices, with many of the steps occurring simultaneously and influencing each other. Some of the decisions are already made for the brewery, such as the climate and water supply. However, with climate-controlled rooms and complex water filtering, even those have become increasingly negligible. The brewery needs to decide what kind of sake it wants to make and then make choices during the production process that move toward that goal.
Polishing the Rice
First, the rice is polished to the desired percentage. Many breweries outsource the polishing process, as rice-polishing machines, which are several stories high, are expensive to buy, run and maintain. The machines also must be housed separately from the brewery so the powder from polished bran doesn’t accidentally mix with the fermenting sake. The outer layers of a rice grain are packed with vitamins, minerals, proteins and fats. While these might make rice taste good, they can adversely affect sake’s flavor. That said, some brewers might want the flavors produced by those outer layers. Outer layers are removed for ginjo and daiginjo, whereas breweries aiming for rich, full-bodied flavors keep the polishing to a minimum.
THE RICE-POLISHING REVOLUTION
“Early brewers were driven by a desire to make better sake, and realized that improving the rice polishing ratio was essential,” says Isao Aramaki, vice president and general manager at Kamotsuru Sake Brewing in Saijo, Hiroshima. Aramaki sits in a leather chair, the tea before him untouched. He’s too busy talking rice polishing.
Images of rice being pounded are among the earliest in Japanese art. Bronze bells from the Yayoi period (300 BC – AD 250) depict stick figures pounding rice to remove the husk and the bran. For the next 2,000 years, Japanese people would gradually develop better technology to polish those grains, taking unpolished brown rice to highly polished white rice, from stone mortar to wood, from foot-powered milling to water-powered milling, which polished the grains like never before.
It was in Hiroshima that rice polishing was revolutionized forever. In the Edo period (1603–1868), the region’s sake simply wasn’t as good as the booze flowing from Kobe’s Nada brewing district, where rice polishing contraptions powered by waterwheels helped produce truly delicious sake. But the Hiroshima town now known as Saijo would become one of Japan’s most famous brewing districts in the 20th century thanks to the advent of high-tech rice polishing machines. While Saijo’s good medium-soft water makes excellent ginjo sake possible, it doesn’t have anything to do with the town’s technological feats. “There is no direct connection between soft water and the development of the rice polishing technique,” says Aramaki. The main reason was the way locals embraced the new machine-driven tech. In Saijo, Riichi Satake started it all.
Riichi Satake, inventor of Japan’s first modern, mechanical rice polisher.
The son of farmers, Satake was born in the Saijo area in 1863. He excelled at school and was hailed as a child prodigy. In his teens, he began thinking there had to be a better way to polish table rice than the exhausting foot-pedal-powered method originally imported from China. During his 20s and early 30s, Satake oversaw public works projects, including the construction of train lines. He met Wahei Kimura, the founder of Kamotsuru Sake Brewery, by chance. The two struck up a friendship, and Kimura became a surrogate father to the younger engineer and inventor, who had lost his dad at a young age. In 1895, Satake began working on what would become Japan’s first power-driven rice-polishing machine. A year later, Satake had developed the “quadruple-mortar machine,” with custom parts he made himself. His first customer was Wahei Kimura.
This Hokusai woodblock print is taken from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. For sake making, brewers would harness waterwheels like this to achieve previously impossible polishing ratios.
Japan’s first power-driven rice polisher didn’t come out of nowhere. Hiroshima was rapidly industrializing by the late 19th century. In 1877, for example, a massive state-of-the-art textile factory opened in Hiroshima, outfitted with thousands of the latest English-made mechanical looms. By the late 1880s, Hiroshima was home to a large military base, so there were plenty of thirsty troops ready to drink locally brewed sake. In 1894, when war broke out with China, Hiroshima was connected by rail to Tokyo, providing a flow of troops into the city and, as Hiroshima’s sake improved, a way for Hiroshima brewers to reach larger markets; furthermore, the city’s harbor was bustling with boats. That fall, as the military conflict with China continued, Emperor Meiji and the imperial court temporarily relocated to Hiroshima until the following spring so the court could keep a closer eye on the war. Hiroshima was more important than ever.
The power-driven rice polisher was not invented in Japan, but in the United Kingdom, in the early 1860s. The country was not a major producer or consumer of rice, but untapped Asian markets offered lucrative opportunities. In 1888, the Engelberg Huller Company of Syracuse, New York also launched a smaller machine for grain hulling and rice polishing. With new technology flowing into Hiroshima, and inventive minds eager to embrace it and develop and adapt their own, it was not surprising that Hiroshima came up with Japan’s first power-driven polisher.
Riichi Satake handmade all the parts for his first rice polisher. At that time, the resulting machine was twenty times more effective than other manpowered rice-polishing contraptions.
“Satake’s power-driven machine paved the way for the development of the vertical rice polishing machine,” says Aramaki. As Hiroshima grew and modernized, Satake continued improving his rice polishers, developing a new abrasive roller in 1922. Everything changed eight years later in 1930 with the Vertical Abrasive Power-Driven Milling Machine Type C. Unlike horizontal polishing machines, which are used for table rice, the vertical design used gravity to drop the rice through the center chamber, which was outfitted with a center grindstone coated with carborundum. Horizontal polishing machines have the rice grains rub each other, but the Type C polished the grain with the abrasive center roller to achieve a 40 percent polishing ratio, removing 50 percent of the rice grain. In comparison, the water wheels of the previous generation, which helped make Nada’s sake the best in Japan, could only achieve an 80 to 70 percent polishing ratio, buffing away 20 to 30 percent of the rice. The Type C revolutionized everything and became the standard, resulting in more uniform, finely polished grains that didn’t chip or crack. The sake industry can be divided into pre– and post–Type C. Without it, ginjo-shu and daiginjo-shu as they’re now defined would not be possible. The Satake Machinery Factory, now the Satake Corporation, has become a global giant with a 50 percent share of the Japanese market.
All of which shows that Aramaki is right when he states, “We can say that the history of sake is the history of rice polishing.”
Satake continues to innovate, making
