What is sake?

Wordy alert!! It’s very wordy…since it’s sober Judie talking…so, please bear with me.

Sake is, in a nutshell,

1. Fermented alcoholic beverage (not distilled!)

2. With around 15-20% alcoholic content

3. Fermented with grain (rice)

Sake VS Beer VS Wine: All fermented alcoholic beverage

The essence of any alcoholic fermentation is yeast converting sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Let's discuss the fermentation process of wine VS beer VS sake in a relatively simplified manner for the sake of easy understanding.

With wine, the process is a little simpler (in a way) as sugar is naturally present in the grape juice, which is ready for use by yeast for fermentation. With one step in the fermentation process, we can call it the simple fermentation process.

In the case of beer, with no fermentable sugar readily present in the barley grains, an extra step is needed to break down the starch molecules within the grains into smaller sugar molecules which will then be used in the subsequent fermentation process. Barley is malted to create enzymes which will act as the agent to break down the starch molecules into sugar molecules- a process known as "Saccharification". Followed by the addition of yeast, which will do the rest of the job to turn the sugar into alcohol- "Fermentation". With a step-by-step process of "Saccharification- then- Fermentation", we can call this the multiple sequential fermentation. 

Setting the scene for our Sake- it shares some similarities with wine and beer, but different enough that it should deserve its own category. Similar to wine, it's a fermented alcoholic beverage. Similar to beer, it's fermented with grain. Yet, with a different kind of grain- Rice; with a different kind of enzymes- Koji (a kind of mold) which is an external agent for the process of "Saccharification". Koji is added to a tank of steamed rice, water and yeast, where saccharification and fermentation happen at the same time, in the same tank. This is why sake fermentation earns its own category of multiple parallel fermentation.

~ The end (if you have come this far in reading this post, I am really grateful for your time and attention- afterall, words can't catch much attention anymore these days..)