Taylor-MadeAK - Brewing Sake

Introduction

This guide is intended teach you, my fellow homebrewers, how to make authentic seishu (清酒) - refined Japanese sake - at home, using the kan-zukuri (寒作り) [cold-brewed] method. While I’m at it, I hope to educate you, at least a little bit, about different varieties of sake and maybe even different methods for making it. I don’t intend for this to be the be-all end-all guide to sake, but I do hope it will encourage more homebrewers to take an interest in making their own sake at home from ingredients and equipment that are quite readily available. This is a long guide, with many pages, but hopefully taking the time to read all those pages will help shed some light on a process that appears at first glance to be complex, mysterious, and heavily steeped in tradition, but really is quite simple at its heart and even based on familiar science.

This guide is aimed at moderately experienced homebrewers. If you’re not a homebrewer, some terms will be a little unfamiliar to you. A quick Google search will usually help define those words for you, but feel free to post questions in the form of comments on this guide. I’ll be more than happy to answer them for you.

This guide contains quite a few Japanese characters, which won’t display correctly if you don’t have the Japanese language pack for your OS installed. If 清酒 looks like a couple empty boxes and that bothers you, then set your browser encoding to Japanese (Shift-JIS) and follow the prompts to install the Japanese language pack. If it doesn’t bother you to have empty boxes in place of certain characters, then carry on!

Finally, to give credit where it’s due, everything I know about making sake, I learned from the book Sake (U.S.A) by Fred Eckhardt. I don’t want to duplicate his work in its entirety here, but the recipe and method presented here are based on what I learned from his work in that book and my experience as a homebrewer. I heartily recommend adding his book to your library if you find this guide to be at all helpful, and if you can locate a copy for a reasonable price.

I would also like to point out here that this is only one of many different methods homebrewers can use to make true sake at home. In the interim since I originally brought this guide to the internet in 2007, Fred Eckhardt has written an update of his own method and made it available to the online homebrewing community. While I've done my best to cover all the different options available to the sake homebrewer while also trying to keep things simple for the beginner here, it's worth noting that the above linked instructions now differ significantly from this guide in quite a few ways. That having been said, it's certainly worth reading after you're done here.

Shall we get started? Use the table of contents below or the page numbers at the bottom of this post to navigate the guide.

Table of Contents

Page 1: Introduction

Page 2: About Sake and How Sake is Made

Page 3: The Recipe

Page 4: Ingredients

Page 5: Equipment

Page 6: Preparing the Rice

Page 7: The Process

Page 8: Secondary Fermentation

Page 9: Maturation and Bottling

Page 10: Drinking Sake and Conclusion

Pages: 1· 2· 3· 4· 5· 6· 7· 8· 9· 10

Appendix A: Downloads

To help you in your sake making experience, I’m making some files available for download from this guide. All of the following files are hosted with permission from their respective authors. Here are your options:

• sake task list.pdf (60KB) - This is my standard task list in PDF form. To use it, just print it out and pencil in the projected dates and times for each step. Then you just check ‘em off as you go.
  
  
• How to Make Sake Offline v2.pdf (2.3MB) - This is the most recent (but not up-to-date!) version of my guide in PDF form so that you can have it available to you offline in those dark times of no internet connectivity. I will increment the version number and make a new post when it’s updated, so use the RSS feed to keep track of updates. This file is my creation and is not to be confused with the next one on this list.


• Sake Making.pdf (980KB) - Created by Steve Ross, this is an offline-viewable file based on an older version of my guide. The guide has been updated several times since, making this guide deprecated. I couldn’t get Steve to update it for me, which led to my creation of the above listed file. Posted for those unfortunate souls who are stuck using dial-up internet, where a 1MB difference in file size actually matters.


• ekhardt-sake.pdf (27KB) - This is Fred Ekhardt’s “New Sake Recipe,” created in 2002. This recipe describes the shubo method of yeast starter, which uses lactic acid to lower the pH in an effort to speed up the process and reduce the risk of infection. This is the method that many other sites are describing when they tell you to add acid (lactic, citric, lemon juice, etc.) to your sake recipe, and is quite commonly used by large sake producers. I’m hosting the file here because it’s difficult to find without bludgeoning yourself with internet search engines for hours on end.


• sake_deutsch.pdf (2.5MB) - A German language (Deutsch) guide to making sake written by my good friend Matthias "catwiesel" Busch. It's largely incorporates information found all across the Taylor-MadeAK guides, from making koji to drinking sake it's very ambitious. If your native language is German and you're interested in making your own sake, this is the file for you!


• sake_schedule_spreadsheet.zip (45KB) - E-mailed to me by fellow sake homebrewer Deanna Morris, this is an excellent alternative to commercial calendar applications (or Google Calendar) for the home sake brewer to use in working out their sake homebrewing schedule. This spreadsheet is in OpenDocument format, which means you should probably consider using OpenOffice.org to open and make use of it.

Appendix B: Frequently Asked Questions

You guys keep sending me a lot of really interesting questions about making sake, and I've accumulated and answered enough of them so far to make into a Frequently Asked Questions list. So, here it is, the Taylor-MadeAK Homebrewing Sake FAQ!

Contents:

• Hey, my sake is yellow! What did I do wrong?
• Can I use other kinds of rice?
• What about American rice vs. Asian rice?
• Without an original gravity measurement, how can I determine the alcohol content of my homemade sake?
• What about plum wine?
• Is it possible to use other types of grain to make sake?
• I saw this stuff called "rice malt syrup" can I use that to make sake?
• Do I really have to use several 1 gallon jugs as secondaries? Can I use [insert on-hand equipment here] instead?
• Is it really necessary to soak the rice for 18 hours? I'm reading on line on how to make sushi rice and most say to soak for 30 minutes.
• How do I calculate my sake's alcohol content?
• Somebody told me I could go blind by homebrewing sake. Should I be concerned with methanol in my sake, and is there's anything I should do to get rid of it?
• Why is it necessary to continue to add more koji at each step? If the mold in the koji is active and digesting the rice starch shouldn't it be reproducing as well, much like the yeast?
• I can't get any of the WYeast Sake #9 yeast that you recommend. Can you use other kinds of yeast to make sake?
• Sake Timetable

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Appendix C: Glossary of Terms

Since my guide uses a lot of Japanese and other uncommon words that many readers may be unfamiliar with, I've decided to add a glossary. This list is intended to supplement the guide and not to be comprehensive. I tried to avoid defining terms that I have already defined in the guide (though there are some obvious duplications that I felt were important), but please feel free to refer to it as often as necessary.

The glossary itself starts after the jump.

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So...you've made your fist batch of sake. You've pressed your lees and now you've got about three pounds of pasty kasu. I know what you're thinking: what the heck do I do with this stuff? I get asked this question pretty often, actually, often enough to make this post. The answer to your question is: lotsa stuff! Sake kasu has almost as many uses as miso, but it's not quite so popular in this country because of its rarity. The Japanese find it very useful, however.

In Japan, fresh kasu becomes available in Spring as all the sake kuras press their sake. They then sell their kasu to grocers for public consumption or to farmers for use as livestock feed. In America, we don't have quite the same heritage with sake as the Japanese do, so kasu generally isn't easily found in our markets. But we're homebrewers, right? We make our own kasu!

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