Yoshihiro Sako, owner and head brewer of Den Sake Brewery in Oakland, uses California-grown sake rice to make the Japanese wine.
Sake Continued from Page 10
converted into alcohol. The mash stays in the temperature-con- trolled tank for up to a month before it is pressed, filtered and pasteurized. Most sake is then aged for around six months. “If you do it right, the sake becomes aro- matic, light, elegant and complex,” with an alcohol volume usually between 13% and 18%, Sako said. Sako always uses rice from a single ori- gin, printing the farm’s name on the bottle, so that he can replicate the formula. Since opening Den Sake Brewery in 2017, he has twice been named a semifinalist for a pres- tigious James Beard Award. The demand for California-grown sake rice is driven by large Japanese- headquartered companies with distrib- utors in the U.S. But craft breweries such as Den Sake also play an important role, O’Donnell said. “The craft breweries are really elevating sake to the consumer,” she said. “When consumers see a sake craft brewery in their neighborhood, they might go in and try it for the first time.” Caleb Hampton is assistant editor of Ag Alert. This story first appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of California Bountiful® magazine. He can be reached at champton@cfbf.com.
“Sake rice is something special,” O’Donnell said. Milling a truckload of rice down to the pearly shinpaku takes the mill around three weeks, much longer than the stan- dard milling done for sushi rice. Yoshihiro Sako, owner and head brewer of Den Sake Brewery in Oakland, has been making sake for eight years. He learned the nuances of sake during years as a sake buyer and sommelier in San Francisco restaurants and as an apprentice at sake breweries in Japan. As a brewer, Sako has opted for more traditional methods that use a larger part of the rice kernel. “In ancient times, there were no ma- chines to mill, so they used minimally polished rice when they made sake,” he said. Mastering that method, he said, has helped him “create a modern flavor.” Aside from rice, sake has three ingredi- ents: water, yeast and koji, a special mold produced by only a handful of suppliers in Japan. When preparing a batch of sake, Sako steams the rice, spreads it out on a large table and mixes in the mold and yeast. The koji breaks down the starch into sugar, which is then fermented by the yeast and
A glass of sake is displayed at Den Sake Brewery in Oakland, which uses sake rice grown in California to make the Japanese wine.
June 18, 2025 Ag Alert 11
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