JOURNAL
Short pieces from the tasting room — the things guests ask about most.
READING THE LABEL
The large characters are usually the brand, not the brewery or the style. The information that predicts how a sake will taste sits in the small print on the back: the rice polishing ratio, whether alcohol was added, and whether it was pasteurised. We start the tasting here, because once you can find those three things, any bottle shop in Japan becomes readable.
JUNMAI AND GINJO
Junmai means rice, water and koji, with nothing added. Ginjo describes how far the rice was polished and how cool the fermentation ran. The two labels answer different questions, which is why a bottle can be both. Tasted side by side, the difference stops being vocabulary: ginjo tends to smell of fruit and flowers, junmai of rice and the savoury side of the grain.
KOJI
Rice has no sugar for yeast to work on, so sake needs a step that beer and wine do not: koji, a mould grown over steamed rice that converts starch into sugar while the yeast ferments alongside it. It is the same organism behind miso and soy sauce. We pass koji rice around at every session, because tasting it sweet and chestnut-like explains more than any diagram.