My first batch of home-brewed sake
Last night I had a couple glasses of the sake, specifically doburoku, I brewed over the last two weeks. The taste is pretty good for my first try. It is a bit sweet and very smooth. Each glass went down real easy and didn’t leave me reeling due to the taste or alcohol content. I suspect it contains about 12-15% alocohol by volume which makes one glass of sake comparable to a glass of wine. The recipe I used says the final product would be about 15-18% alcohol by volume but I think I used a bit too much water while brewing. You can read more about the technical aspects of brewing sake on Wikipedia or take a look at the recipe I followed. Read on for more about my brewing process.
The brewing process starts with creating koji-kome, a malt rice. The koji-kome is rice with a fungus growing on it. This fungus is what turns starch to sugar and sugar to alcohol. Creating the koji-kome seems like a delicate process and I almost threw out the first batch because it didn’t smell quite right after the 40 hour growth period. I washed the rice until it was white and there wasn’t any sediment in the run-off. That took longer than I expected but I had no frame of reference for how long it would take. I never washed rice to the point of spotlessness before that day. I just put the rice in a fine strainger and used the sprayer on the kitchen sink to wash it. I shook the strainer to move the rice around and get at the unwashed rice. The rice should be white when it’s clean. More white than white paper. Putting a clear glass under the strainer to catch the runoff should give you a clear glass of water.
Soaking the rice for 90 minutes was the easiest part of the whole process.
Steaming the rice, on the other hand, proved to be a little more difficult than I expected. I thought my vegetable steamer would be plenty big enough. Steaming the rice sterilizes it so that only the koji-kin mold grows on it. I found out later that I could have just used the rice cooker, though steaming gives better results. The steaming tray on my steamer has large holes in it, much too large to keep the rice from falling through into the boiling water. I put a flour sack cloth into the steaming tray to keep the rice from falling through. The flour sack is a very thin material that doesn’t impede the steam passing through and into the rice. The cloth was also useful in keeping the condensing water from falling onto the rice. I created a little pouch for the rice to sit in with the cloth and then put the cover on and let it steam for about 70 minutes. At the end of the steaming process the rice should be slightly transparent or tan. I wasn’t sure the color was right but I continued anyway. My steamer may be too small to steam all the rice in 70 minutes. The amount of rice in the recipe was a tight fit into the tray. I wonder if a larger steamer would steam the rice better. After cooling the rice I sprinkled the koji-kin mold on it, placed a damp flour sack cloth over the container and let it sit on a heating pad set to low.
Not sure that I did everything right I started a second batch of koji-kome the next day under my wife’s supervision. I hoped to rectify any mistakes I made with the first batch which I suspected would not produce the moldy rice I wanted.
This is where I almost threw out the first batch koji-kome. It seems like the heating pad, even set to low, was too warm for the rice and it appeared to dry out. Mold needs a dark, damp location to grow and I thought the rice got too dry during this time. At the end of the 40 hour growth period I didn’t think the rice had the strong cheese smell indicated by the recipe. Rather than deal with it immediately I went to work. When I came home Christina told me the rice reeks and I needed to deal with it. I took a sniff and really stuck my nose in there. Smelling the strong cheese smell made my day! It seems like the first batch of koji-kome worked after all. Maybe the mold needed a few extra hours. Maybe my nose was stuffed up in the morning and I couldn’t distinguish the mold smell from the rice smell. Though the recipe says it is a strong cheese smell I think it was mild. I decided to continue with the first batch of koji-kome.
The second batch of koji-kome should be better than the first. After steaming it I kept it warm by filling two 2-liter Diet Coke bottles with steaming hot water. I turned the kitchen sink to as hot as it would go and let the water run until steam was coming from it. I put these bottles under the koji-kome container. The container had a damp flour sack cloth on top of it, then I put the lid on the plastic container as best I could. It wouldn’t snap into place due to the damp cloth hanging over the sides. I put the container on top of the bottles and wrapped them all in two beach towels I arranged in an X shape. I replaced the water in the bottles with steaming hot water every 8 hours or so to ensure the temperature stayed as close to 86F as possible.
With my malt rice ready to go I had to steam another 3.3 lbs of rice. This is the rice that will be turned to sugar then alcohol during the brewing process. The 0.9 lbs. of rice used to make koji-kome was about the limit of what the vegetable steamer could handle. The 3.3 lbs. of rice for brewing was way too much. I decided to divide and conquer. I put 1 lb. of rice in the steamer and the rest in my fine strainer. The strainer was precariously balanced over the largest pot we own. By the way, I didn’t actually weigh the rice in any of the steps in the recipe. I eyeballed everything and verfied by putting it in my hand and saying “close enough”. I left the steamer and pot of boiling water for about 70 minutes and hoped for the best.
When I came back down to check on the rice I found the rice in the steamer looked about the same as the rice for the koji-kome. Checking on the rice in the strainer/pot combo I found that, whoops, I melted my strainer. The handle is now a nice L shape. As the handle melted before my eyes the rice approached the boiling water. I had to rescue the rice before it was immersed or it would be unusable. I got the strainer out before it was fully submerged. Only a little bit of the rice on the bottom contacted the water. That rice immediately turned to mush and was easily separated from the steamed rice. I lost a miniscule amount of rice to the boiling water.
Like I said, I didn’t actually measure the rice or water during the process. I may have used slightly more than the 4 liters of water in the recipe. It wasn’t much more but it may have watered down the end product. I won’t know for sure until I use the second batch of koji-kome. I estimated 4 liters of water by using two sterilized 2-liter Diet Coke bottles.
I left the mixture of koji-kome, water, citric acid, rice and yeast to brew for 10 days. I mixed the ingredients on a Monday night and bottled the sake the following Thursday night. Most of this time the mixture smelled like yeast. It didn’t actually start smelling like sake until Sunday. I bravely decided to try a couple teaspoons of the mixture to see how it progressed. It tasted the best on Wednesday night before bottling. It was very sweet and a pleasure to drink. I got a bit braver and tried a mouthful. I swished it around in my mouth and looked for the sweet, slightly bitter taste. I was very happy with the brew and I consider that the taste’s peak.
On Thursday I thought the flavor declined in my after-work tasting. The sweet flavor was not as pronounced and the bitter flavor was more intense. The rice in the brew turned into a white paste-like gelatin. Because we had only one pot large enough to hold the brew I had to use several smaller pots to strain it. I used the large spaghetti strainer to filter the rice out once I got the brew to a more managable volume. After using the spaghetti strainer I ran the brew through my melted fine strainer to get the last of the large sediment out. The resulting liquid was cloudy just like the recipe said it would be.
I pasturized the sake in order to kill the yeast and preserve the sake long enough to enjoy it. I put the sake back in the large pot and put it on the stove for about 20 minutes. The sake needs to be heated to 145F to kill the yeast. I had about 3.5 liters of sake and getting it up to 145F took about 15 minutes. After I pasturized the sake I had another mouthful. The taste improved dramatically. Killing the yeast seemingly turned the clock back by a day and the sake tasted closer to Wednesday night’s tasting. I used the same sterilized 2-liter Diet Coke bottles for the sake. Don’t worry, I got the nasty Diet Coke flavor out of the bottles before pouring the sake in to them.
After spending Thursday night and Friday in the fridge the sediment in the sake fell out of the solution. Most of the flavor in the sake comes from the sediment though. Looking at the sake through the bottle there was about 15% of the solution on the top and the bottom 85% of the bottle had the settled sediment. After dinner I pulled it out of the fridge, shook the bottle and poured a glass. Served cold the sake tasted fantastic. I poured a second glass when I was done with the first. The quality of the sake is very high which surprises me. I was unsure of how well it would taste while it was brewing. I’m excited to start the next batch tomorrow. Once I figured out what I was doing the process was enjoyable. I’ve worked out the first-time problems which should lead to even better tasting sake the next time around.
