How to make sake in Japan

• How to make sake in Japan

October 1 in Japan celebrate the Japanese wine (Nihon-shu-no Hi), or how to translate for us, foreigners, Day sake. True, this is not the Land of the Rising Sun Festival official or national.

We decided to show you how is the famous Japanese alcoholic beverage.

Writes vobche: "Today we go to small family factory for the manufacture of sake. Let's see, the conditions in which it is produced.

For some reason I thought that we must come to the outskirts of the city, in the industrial zone, to dress up in clothing and get into the huge shop white, where on the conveyor belt kilometer long ride bottle of sake, and workers in white overalls stand and monitor the work automatic lines ...

"Probably a dream" - I thought, stepping over the threshold of "enterprise". "

Plant greeted us with a few bags of rice, for cleaning processing equipment, its soaking, fermentation, filtration, pasteurization and aging.

Let's get acquainted with the production process and at the same time look at the pictures. For the preparation of sake using rice special varieties, which differ in large and heavy grains with high starch content. Special requirements are imposed and a water - it should contain potassium, magnesium, phosphorus and calcium, but be free of iron and manganese.

In the first step of production polished rice, while grind of from 10 to 50% of the grain.

are polished rice is washed with water and soaked for a time from several hours to days.

Then the rice is subjected to steam treatment. Part of parboiled rice is used to make sourdough - added thereto culture molds and allowed to stand in a warm and humid environment for about 35 hours.

Next, the resulting mash is mixed with steamed rice and water, and then within 15-35 days the main fermentation takes place.

The resulting beverage is settled and filtered. For sake with a mellow flavor using pasteurization and aging in special pressurized tanks for 6-12 months.

But more remains to pour sake into the container and affix the label.

stored products here, under a canopy ... On the territory of the small factory we moved in slippers.

That is it, the production of sake. Of course, there is also a very modern production of the drink. At the factory, of course, there is a shop and a small tasting room, where we went next.

Tasting process was simple: we are small piles of trays with a drink, and we drank them :) Total somewhere 5-6 stopochek different fortress. By all accounts, the most pleasant taste was about 17% vol. Sake is so unlike traditional European types of alcohol that carry it to a group of alcoholic beverages is very problematic. Sake is often called rice wine that is fundamentally wrong and stems from allegations that the distillation (distillation) used in the production of the drink. In fact, for the distillation mistaken for normal pasteurization traditional technology sake.

also called Sake rice wine, which again is not true, since it includes the mold fermentation technology (not to be confused with fermentation) and the formation of rice malt mash, parboiled rice and water. In fact, sake is nothing more than rice beer. And although its strength varies in the range 14, 5-20% vol., Sake usually refers to soft drinks because of technological peculiarities of production.