Visit a Shinto shrine around the New Year and you may be offered a cup of hot sake by a kimono-clad priestess for drinking to health, wealth and happiness for the year ahead. The sacred drink has always connected the Japanese to their kami (gods or spirits) through religious offerings and blessings of rice fields, fishing boats and new houses; and to each other through toasts at weddings, coming of age ceremonies and the sealing of business deals. It has always been the boozy soul animating the country’s traditional culture.

But while sales are booming abroad, this ancient drink is suffering on its home turf despite being so interwoven with Japanese tradition. Drinking habits are changing as rapidly as a Shinkansen bullet train; sake consumption in Japan halved between 1996 and 2011 and now makes up only six per cent of alcohol sales.

“It used to be the case that Japanese women would go shopping for oil for lamps, soy sauce for cooking and sake to drink,” says Philip Harper, a sake master brewer or tōjī, for Kinoshita Brewery in Kyoto Prefecture. “It was a necessity of life here until the 1970s, when, for the first time, beer overtook sake in sales. Since then, lifestyles have changed and there are now many more options available to eat and drink.

“But there was still that expectation that people would buy sake, and it took the industry a very long time to realise that this was no longer the case. And since most sake breweries are family-owned, commercially they behave more like relatives working together than a business that wants to make money. That didn’t particularly help the industry.”

In recent years, beer, whisky and shōchū (similar to vodka and distilled from sweet potatoes, buckwheat, potatoes, rice or other grains) have all taken a cut of sake’s market share, and consumers outside of Japan may represent the best hope for the small-batch sake brewer’s salvation, since overseas sales have taken the opposite trajectory to domestic sales – up by 175 per cent in value over the last decade.

“The sake industry as a whole has a pretty medieval approach to marketing, so this increase in sales isn’t down to a deliberate campaign,” Harper explains. “It’s a welcome side-effect to the popularity of Japanese food overseas, especially in the USA. In the last few years, the number of Japanese restaurants opening globally has grown enormously. So, that has automatically increased the market for sake.” Japanese food was also recently awarded UNESCO heritage status  – only the second country after France to be given this accolade.

“Although the sake industry as a body hasn’t been all that successful in promoting what it does, individual breweries have worked really hard at reviving it. As a result, more and more people overseas are starting to find out how good sake is, especially when it is served with food,” Harper says.

As his name betrays, Philip Harper is originally from England and travelled to Japan in the late 1980s to teach English, eventually becoming the first ever foreign-born tōjī. “I got hooked on sake when I first came out here. I used to go to sake tasting clubs and I did rice planting with two other friends, and so I moved from the consumption end to the brewing end. My two friends also became sake brewers and all three of us are still doing it today. It takes 10 years to learn the basics and 20 years before you really know what’s going on. That’s what old-school sake brewers will tell you and I have to say, I have found that to be true.”

Helping to raise the profile of sake in the UK, Natsuki Kikuya is a former sake sommelier and founder of the Museum of Sake, who hopes the drink can extend its reach beyond sushi restaurants. “More and more people, especially the foodies who love pop-up restaurants, fancy new bars and food blogging, are really keen on learning about sake. My goal is to get British people drinking sake at home. It goes with pretty much anything: oysters, chocolate, Spanish food,” says Kikuya, who is steeped in the culture and lore of sake brewing with a family history in the industry stretching back 300 years.

It is not clear precisely how or where sake brewing began, but knowledge of rice cultivation came to Japan from China around 2,500 years ago and rice liquor features prominently in ancient legends. (How else would you rescue your future bride from sacrifice to an eight-headed serpent monster other than by enticing him into a sake-baited trap and lopping off his intoxicated heads?)

“It takes 10 years to learn the basics and 20 years before you really know what’s going on”

‘Sake’ is used in Japan to refer to alcoholic beverages in general, but has become the term used by foreigners for Japan’s fermented rice drink – ‘nihonshu’ to locals. At 15–17% ABV, sake has the highest alcohol content of any brewed drink, but is far from being the potent shot glass fodder many in the West imagine it to be – a misconception perhaps encouraged by its use in the notorious ‘sake bomb’ (a hot sake shot poured into a cold beer or Red Bull) favoured by frat boys.

Sake brewers start by polishing white rice to remove fats, proteins and minerals and get down to the pure, starchy core of the grain. As a basic rule of thumb, the more intense the polish, the higher the grade of the sake. While the bog-standard table sakes (accounting for around 75 per cent of the Japanese market) retain as much as 80 per cent of the grain, makers of a top-notch daiginjo (‘extra special brew’) sake might polish their rice down below 40 per cent. After polishing, the rice is washed, steeped and steamed.

Mould is the magic ingredient in sake manufacture. Spores of the kōji mould (Aspergillus oryzae; the same fungal agent used to make miso and soy sauce) are sprinkled onto steamed rice, turning its starches into sugars, coating the grains with a puffy crust giving them the appearance of snow-white Rice Krispies, and, according to Harper, the aroma of roast chestnuts.

The imperial court embraced sake brewing as early as the 7th century but, as with beer in medieval Europe, religious institutions were the great drivers of innovation. Shōryaku temple, established by royal edict as one of the great centres of Japanese Buddhism in AD 992, is credited with pioneering the use of kōji rice-polishing and fermentation techniques used to this day. Although its glory days are long gone, the temple continues to supply a small clutch of local breweries with its yeast–rice–kōji starter mash, or moto, made to a centuries-old recipe. Even the more modern techniques for making high-quality moto require 10–15 days of careful nurturing to create a pure, concentrated yeast culture, which will be used to ferment the main batch and bring complex flavours and aromas to the sake.

The focus of sake production began to move away from religious institutions from the 16th century, as merchants developed large-scale brewing in wooden vats. These more commercially minded brewers strived to create sakes of an even quality, discovering pasteurisation 300 years before Louis Pasteur, but also recognising the importance of low, even temperatures for creating sakes of a similar quality. This resulted in them brewing only in the winter months.

Japan’s plunge into modernity following the country’s opening up to the world in 1868 transformed the sake industry for better and worse. Microbiology, mechanisation and enamel tanks allowed brewers to produce better-quality sake in larger quantities and in 1905 a third of government revenues came from sake taxes, suggesting an industry in rude health. However, rice shortages during and after the Second World War led to restrictions on sake production. In response, brewers added flavourings, sugar and distilled alcohol – cost-saving innovations which have left their mark on mass-market sakes to this day.

As with beer in medieval Europe, religious institutions were the great drivers of innovation

As a result, many Japanese drinkers associate their national tipple with hangover-dealing bruisers rather than the fragrant, fruity and allegedly healthy (low acidity and no sulphites) drink attracting admiration from connoisseurs around the world.

“Although we’ve had difficulties in the past, there are a lot of good signs for the future of sake brewing,” says Harper. “As things have been so hard in recent years, breweries have been forced to really think about their brewing methods, the way sake is perceived and the way sake is drunk. As a result, there is a huge variety of sake styles available and the industry has been more proactive in drawing attention to these.

“Work still needs to be done as the bulk of sake being sold is still entry-level, and that part of the market is far from booming. Sales of higher-end sakes are increasing but your bread-and-butter stuff still isn’t performing as well as we would like. But, there is an enormous swell of interest from the overseas market, and if the industry looks after those people well, we will be able to break the vicious circle of the last few decades and move the industry into a better place.”

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Sake’s Greyfriars Bobby

While Natsuki Kikuya emphasises the need for sake to break into new markets, as the scion of a sake dynasty of 300 years’ standing, she’s also steeped in the history and lore of a great brewing tradition. “Sake is so much about storytelling,” she says. And the Kikuya ancestral brewery in northerly Akita prefecture has its own legend. Every day a man with a great love for sake would stop to enjoy a drink at the brewery bar on his way home from work, leaving his horse and cart waiting outside. After many years the man grew old and died, outlived by his faithful horse, who was sold off. The horse’s new owner was confused to find the animal – perhaps in mourning for his late master – stopping and refusing to budge each time they came past the brewery.

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Shop sake (affilite)

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