You Don't Know Jack About Sake

Beau Timken started drinking sake the same way most college-age Americans do: too hot and too fast. Quick sips of steaming sake, he was told, would get him drunk faster. But that wasn’t sake, Timken told me on a recent afternoon in his San Francisco shop. That was, in his gringo mispronunciation, “sakeee.” Then one night at a dockside Capetown bar, “sake found me,” he says. Timken met two fishing captains drinking something as far from his sakeee as Capetown is from Canton.

The sake he tried that night tasted of honeydew, and it blew Timken’s mind. He came back to the States with an empty notebook and an eager palate. He started asking sushi chefs about their favorite varieties. Each one touted the sake from their home prefecture, and each one was distinct: dry, masculine Nada sake, from the Napa Valley of Japan; or elegant, lingering Kyoto sake. Bottle by unpronounceable bottle, “a whole snowy slope where no one had laid tracks” opened up before him, Timken says.

A piece of that slope is now on display at his small shop in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. It’s been open for 11 years, and in that time his stock has grown from about a hundred bottles to more than 250. Here, rice and water take on tastes from melon to mushrooms, soil to strawberries, flowers to fenugreek.

Warm or chilled? Try both.

In Timken’s college days, most Americans thought sake was hard alcohol. Really, it’s a strange hybrid: brewed like a beer but with the simplicity of a wine. That is, whereas beers are flavored with hops and other herbs and incorporate different types and treatments of grains, from darkly roasted barley to lightly toasted wheat, sake is just rice, as wine is just grapes. And while there are about 90 different rice varietals used to make sake – you can even use Uncle Ben’s, Timken says – most producers use just one, a high-grade breed called Yamadanishiki. The differences in sakes come from how much the rice is polished. The particular tastes derive from what’s missing: the bran.

“The outside of each grain is what’s good for you – fats, minerals, oils – but bad for sake. Starch is the end game,” Timken explains. So sake rice is milled to get rid of the bran and open up the sweet interior, or “shimpaku,” which yeast spores or – “koji” – munch away on, converting the sugars to booze.

The basic classes of sake are determined by the “seimaibuai” of the rice, or the amount of germ remaining after polishing. Junmai, with a seimaibuai of 70, is only slightly polished. Ginjo reaches about 60, and daiginjo tops the list at a seimaibuai of 50 or less. The best way to get to know sake is to buy a couple of small bottles from each category and taste the differences for yourself. Warm or chilled? Try both. In the U.S., serving ginjo and daiginjo extra-cold, to preserve its thin edge, began as a response to the trend of icy, tasteless vodka and perpetuated a myth that only bad sake comes warm. Good sake is served at many different temperatures, with different flavors appearing at each one.

With junmai, look for earthy, grainy rice tones. “You want to taste the grain,” Timken says. Kirin Koshi No Takumi tastes like a dusty forest floor; Otokoyama is rice-cracker dry; Ozeki Karatamba, a honjozo-style sake, with a little extra alcohol added after fermentation to bring out its nose, blooms with sweet apple. Ginjo sakes, on the other hand, are tight and pristine with clean flavors of fruit and flowers. Dewazakura Oka is aromatic and floral with hints of pear; Kudoki Jozo is bigger, brighter, and more acidic. Daiginjo takes things one step further. Timken calls daiginjos “ethereal”: “you have to look for the flavors,” he says. But they’re there, like the velvety smooth red-wine body in long-drinking Shiumizu no mai and Dassai 50, or the rich orange, melon and peach notes in Wakatake Onikoroshi.

‘The outside of each grain is what’s good for you – fats, minerals, oils – but bad for sake. Starch is the end game,’

But that’s just the beginning. To discover the weird, wild world of truly out-there sakes, move past the rice. Taru sake is aged in cedar casks, as was all sake in days of yore. Choryo tarusake has a woody, umami character. Koshu sake is aged, turning a deep amber, and tastes like musk, mushrooms and cigars. Nama unpasteurized sake is raw and vivacious, like a young Beaujolais; Nigori unfiltered sake is creamy and coconut-sweet.

And then there’s my favorite, kimoto sake, made with wild yeast and bacteria, what the Japanese call “yamahai” or “rafter yeast.” After the big Kobe earthquake 15 years ago, some sake makers in Ishikawa prefecture, where this style is most famous, complained their sakes no longer tasted the same once their centuries-old breweries were rebuilt. New rafters, new yeast, new flavors. Kimoto sakes like Tengumai taste skunky and funky, like a wet dog. Serve them warm, and they buzz with waves of flavor. One second, sweet dark plums, the next, salty miso. A whole world of flavor in just one bottle. That’s the magic of sake: Let it find you.

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