How Sake is Made in Japan

On October 1, Japan celebrates Japanese Wine Day (Nihon-shu-no Hi), or, as it can be translated for us foreigners, Sake Day. True, in the Land of the Rising Sun this holiday is not official or national. But in honor of this day, we decided to show you how the famous Japanese alcoholic drink is made.

Today we are going to a small family sake brewery. Let's see the conditions in which it is produced.

For some reason, it seemed to me that we had to go to the outskirts of the city, to the industrial zone, dress up in special clothing and get into huge white workshops, where bottles of sake travel on a kilometer-long conveyor belt, and workers in snow-white overalls stand and monitor the work of automatic lines...

“I must have dreamed it,” I thought, stepping over the threshold of the “enterprise.”

The plant greeted us with several bags of rice, equipment for cleaning the raw material, soaking it, fermenting it, filtering it, pasteurizing it and aging it.

Let's take a look at the production process and at the same time look at the photos. Sake is made from special rice varieties that have large, heavy grains with a high starch content. Special requirements are also imposed on the water - it must contain potassium, magnesium, phosphorus and calcium, but be free of iron and manganese.

At the first stage of production, rice is polished, which removes 10 to 50% of the grain.

Polished rice is washed with water and soaked for a period of several hours to a day.

The rice is then steamed. Some of the steamed rice is used to make a starter - a mold culture is added to it and it is kept in a warm and humid room for about 35 hours.

Next, the resulting wort is mixed with steamed rice and water, after which the main fermentation takes place over the course of 15-35 days.

The resulting drink is settled and filtered. To obtain sake with a softer taste, pasteurization and aging in special sealed tanks for 6-12 months are used.

Well, all that remains is to pour the sake into containers and stick on labels.

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The products are stored right here, under a canopy... We moved around the factory grounds in slippers.

This is what sake production is like. Of course, there are also very modern productions of this drink. Naturally, there is a shop and a small tasting room at the factory, where we went next. The tasting process was simple: they brought us small glasses with the drink, and we drank them