January Interlude: Sake Season [LC17]

This year begins with a special research project: instead of shaping software, it's brewing sake. Or at least it's washing, soaking, steaming, carrying, and otherwise manipulating large quantities of rice, then cleaning everything involved, over and over again.

I'm installed in a guesthouse along the Yoshino River, a couple hours south of the famous deer park in Nara, and taking a first-hand look at Miyoshino Jozo's sake brewing process for the month. It's an out-of-the-way strip of town with a well-developed timber industry. Large trucks stacked with cut tree trunks drive up and down the riverside. Herons step through the river and stab into it while hawks soar overhead, and blue woodsmoke blends with the fog rising off the green forested hills.

Miyoshino Jozo is better known by its sake brand name: Hanatomoe. It's a refreshing opposite to the light, ephemeral, and ultra-polished competition-style sake profile. Or the dry, fruity, and otherwise blandly alcoholic expressions easiest to find outside of Japan.

I particularly love the Hanatomoe mizumoto, an old-style brewing method that lacto-ferments rice to create the acidified base for a natural yeast starter. All of their sake offers an intensity of flavor, a fruity sweetness on top of deeper umami, balanced by a healthy grain of acidity.

The Sake Season

The wine harvest is a rush; the sake season is a rhythm. The best way I can describe sake brewing so far is to compare it to the winemaking I know, like the 2021 harvest with Luis Seabra.

A wine harvest is directly connected to the output of the agricultural season. Wine producers operate under the constraints of the vintage. When the grapes are ready, when the weather is right, when the picking team is prepared, it's a scramble to harvest the grapes in the ideal condition and process them quickly once they've left the vine.

The wine harvest feels like a long set of sprints, colored with a tinge of chaos, coming to a crescendo in the middle, especially as reds and white overlap, slowly leading back into the lull of routine operation.

The sake season is much less connected to autumn weather and agricultural conditions. The rice harvest is complete before brewing begins, and there are no fermentable sugars to spoil until they are created from steamed rice and koji mold. So craft sake production is a winter sport, with natural temperature control for fermentation (although a 2º Celsius workplace leaves something to be desired.)

Midway through December, this January's schedule at Miyoshino Jozo was already in place. Brewmaster Hashimoto-san had planned how much of which rice from which producer would be washed, soaked, and steamed on each day of the month. He knows where it will go — whether it goes into the koji room first, into a starter tank, or if it's one of the three additions to scale up a main mash — and when it will go there. He knows who will be in the brewery, and can reasonably predict what they will be doing at almost any hour of the day.

Each of the various, interconnected processes takes a known amount of time, interleaving and interlocking together just so. So far, instead of sprints, time at the sake brewery feels like an even-paced marathon marked by rhythm and choreography, broken out into long daily stages.

Searching for a Glimpse

This is my second round of face-to-face exposure with sake brewing, and my first time working with a producer whose sake I already know and enjoy. While I want to understand what makes this sake special, I'm still just making sense of the basics in a way that reading and theory can't help with. It's a physical process. You don't really grasp what each step is trying to achieve until you can see, smell, touch, and taste what is happening there.

I believe quality is an abstract absolute, always worth seeking, a la Alexander's Timeless Way or Pirsig's Zen and the Art. In fermented drink, the specifics of quality are an interaction of the history and culture of production, the producer's own taste and philosophy, and our personal and social experience.

Sake has thousands of years of process, precedent, and procedure. How and why does Hashimoto-san produce something so special at Miyoshino Jozo, where he's been the head brewer for nearly 20 years? A month isn't long enough to find the answer. But I'm hoping to catch a glimpse.

Until next time—

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