The very first
sake drinks in Japan
were made with
a certain human
bodily fluid
that wouldn’t go well
with most drinks today.
If that sounds about as appetizing as a moldy sandwich,
then buckle up, buttercup,
because modern sake is made with actual mold.
This is the 2500 year history of sake in Japan.
The world has changed a lot in two millennia,
we now have smart phones and dumb people.
What hasn’t changed much are the basics of brewing sake.
I want my viewers to succeed in life,
so let me tell you about those basics
and you can go off to start your own sake empire,
or brew it at home and live the sweet life of a degenerate alcoholic.
Whatever success means to you.
First, like with many things Asian, it starts with rice.
Add water and steam to make steamed rice.
Now sake is different from grape wine.
Grapes are sweet,
like a classmate who lets you cheat off her test cuz she likes you,
because grapes have sugar.
Winemakers add yeast to turn that sugar into alcohol.
But sake is made from rice, and rice is a starchy bish.
Rice tells the teacher that you’ve been cheating.
All starch, no sugar.
You need something to turn the starch into sugar before the yeast can do its thing.
Luckily, we have that something.
Unluckily, it’s...
mold.
Koji fungus be the name,
and breaking starch into sugar be the game.
Just sprinkle these bad boys onto your steamed rice
and they’d be twerking all over it
in the time it takes you to figure out how to pronounce their name.
This is why sake is more like beer than wine,
because beer also has this extra step of turning
plant starch into sugar.
Afterwards, you take a barrel and fill it with the koji rice,
water, more steamed rice, and the MVP:
yeast.
This is the yeast starter, called seed mash,
where yeast live their best lives in paradise
making generations of little yeast babies all drunk off their ass.
Once the yeast has multiplied enough, you add it to the main barrel,
along with more koji rice, water, and steamed rice.
This is the main mash, where fermentation happens.
The gloop bubbles for a few weeks, making that fine alcohol that we love.
I know it still looks like lumpy…glue now because the sake is mixed inside
all that undissolved rice, mold, and yeast.
But next, you filter that mess with cloth or something.
This is when the nerd takes off her glasses
and becomes a hot girl who has lost all character development.
What comes out is delicious liquid sake.
Then you age it for at least a few months before drinking or selling.
Now that’s just the basics,
each step can be tweaked to make the sake taste the way you want.
If you’re new to sake, it might be hard to choose one from the store.
I know that’s true for me.
That’s why today I’m going to tippsysake.com to take their quiz.
They’ll send me the exact right type of sake
to get me drunk enough to continue this video,
which is sponsored by Tippsy.
You can buy mouth-watering sake straight from their store,
or you can sign up for their Sake Club service
and get a personalized sake box sent to your door every month
or couple of months,
depending on your level of alcoholism.
Alright, flavor.
I like something rich and a bit sweet.
It fits my character.
Sweet, and wealthy, no--
Categories to exclude?
Nah, we’re inclusive here.
Sake and sushi, they’re perfect for each other
like your mom and dad, after the divorce.
Chilled or warm.
I’ve had warm sake before and oh my ninja
it tasted like someone gurgled sake and spit it back in my mouth.
And I loved it ever since.
So I’m gonna choose chilled.
Probably citrus, tropical, dried fruit.
I am new to the sake scene.
If not for this quiz I’d have no idea what to try.
Three bottles, every month.
I don’t have a problem.
Turns out the sake gods are generous, and fast shippers.
Four days after signing up and Tippsy already delivered the bottles to my door.
They also gave me this cute masu to drink from.
They’re so thoughtful, knowing that I can’t afford cups on a YouTuber income.
The masu transfers a bit of a wood taste to the drink, which I grew fond of actually.
Being a responsible adult, I had to stop myself
because this video wouldn’t have gotten finished let me tell ya.
Luckily I was born with intense self-control and willpower.
If you like sake or if you want to step foot in the sake scene
and don’t know where to start,
I really recommend going to the link in the description below
and using promo code LINFAMY to get 10% off your purchase,
whether you buy the monthly personalized sake box or individual bottles.
They’ll even hook you up with a little booklet
introducing you to the world of sake,
the whole brewing process,
and other interesting information you can share with your friends,
and lose them.
“Eating sashimi with daiginjo sake?
Peh.”
So use my link below to get 10% off some amazing sake right now.
Like now.
Drink alcohol, responsibly!, while supporting the channel.
Where did sake come from?
Like, “Why do you love me?”, it’s a tough question to answer.
It also depends on what you mean by sake.
Some people claim that it originated in Japan.
These people are mostly Japanese.
We did find pots from 3000 to 4000 BCE in Japan
that might have been used to make wine,
but they had grape seeds in them.
People back then probably used grapes and
other fruits to make their family neglecting juice,
but there’s no evidence they made it from rice.
The Chinese have been sipping rice alcohol for a long time.
There’s evidence of rice wine brewing from Stone Age people 9000 years ago
in what is now China,
so it likely traveled from the Chinese mainland to Japan at some point.
More than 2500 years ago, the Japanese were like,
“Yo let’s plant some rice under water and see what happens.”
What happened was they hit the pachinko jackpot
and the machine was spitting out grains of rice.
You don’t want to be brewing sake when you’re
struggling to make enough rice to survive,
but wet rice farmers smashed all the speedrun records.
And what was the first thing they did when they had extra rice?
First, they stopped dying.
Then they got drunk af.
The first time the Chinese ran into Japanese people,
they wrote that the Japanese were born to love wine.
They drank it all the time, especially at ceremonies mourning the dead.
Now you could define sake in a way that would mean true sake originated in Japan.
There’s this old Japanese text from the year 714 about a god that got his rice wet
and it became moldy,
so he made a liquor out of it
and threw a kegger for his followers,
dedicating it to the spirits of the land.
So it sounds like the Japanese have been using this koji fungus
to make sake since ancient times when Pokemon roamed the land.
Now China and Korea used fungi to make alcohol too,
but there’s evidence that the type they used was different.
This koji fungus seemed to be Japanese-only.
The first sake drinks in Japan were probably made
with a certain human bodily fluid called spit,
the spit of virgins.
The stories say that in ancient times,
virgin priestesses chewed rice and spit it into bowls like sexy llamas,
then sealed them.
The spit enzymes turned the starch into sugar,
and the traces of yeast on the rice turned the sugar into alcohol.
This kind of sake wasn’t all liquid, but more like an alcohol porridge.
It was called bijinshu 美人酒, or beautiful woman sake,
and they drank it in religious ceremonies.
Rice always had sacred vibes to the Japanese
because it allowed them to not die,
so it makes sense that they looked at sake in a similar way.
Now in the history of sake,
chewing brewing didn’t happen much,
but once in a while you’ll hear of it.
Someone interviewed an old Okinawan lady
who said that in the 1930s, when she was 14,
she took part in making saliva sake for a Shinto ceremony.
Probably not something you want to hear your mom sign you up for.
“Honey, I volunteered you for the virgin chewing ritual tomorrow.”
She and other girls her age sat around a ceramic pot
chewing rice until their jaws ached,
then spit the mush into the pot.
It was hard work.
In ancient times, brewing sake was a woman’s job.
They’re experts in dealing with yeast.
The Japanese word for brewmaster is toji 杜氏.
It was originally written with these Chinese characters 刀自,
which meant lady or madame in Japanese.
At some point, that changed,
and women were kicked out of the brewhouse,
probably around the time Chinese Buddhism came to Japan in the 500s,
bringing with it the ideals of Confucius,
an influential Chinese philosopher who watched one too many
Andrew Tate videos.
Japanese brewers also thought women’s bodies
were too polluting because of their periods,
and in later medieval times, breweries banned women from stepping foot inside.
They had a saying:
“Let a woman enter the brewery and the sake will sour.”
Now you’re probably asking, “Wait, isn’t one famous god of sake female?”
Good job.
But a folk belief explained that because the goddess of sake was female,
another woman entering the brewery would make the goddess jealous.
Don’t worry though,
a woman could request a talisman to wear that canceled her body’s taint.
The Japanese were serious about their sake.
The early Japanese Imperial Court created a government office
that handled the important work of making sake,
not by chewing but by mold,
and banned anyone else from making it.
The court used this traditional drink in sacred events like religious rituals, ceremonies,
and killer parties for the nobles.
One type of party they had was called the Winding Stream Party.
It was a poetry contest that came from China, involving wine,
a type of contest known to historians as a drinking game.
To play, a bunch of noblemen put on their noble outfits,
waddled up to a calm stream,
and sat by the banks.
Servants floated sake cups down the stream.
A noble had to write some mad rhymes about some chosen topic
before the cup reached him.
If he didn't finish in time, the unpoetic loser had to drink the cup.
And he’d probably write a poem about how he couldn’t finish the poem.
Ideas abound within my head, Oh but the page stays blank instead.
The cup arrives, so cold my sweat, And I am filled with deep regret.
They really liked poetry.
In medieval times [1185 - 1603], starting in the late 1100s,
the sake community went through a revolution.
New brewing techniques developed in the medieval period,
and they even came up with a technique you’ve heard of,
but the West didn’t invent until the 1800s.
So one day the Imperial Court decided to give up its sake monopoly.
They graciously allowed anyone to make it.
And immediately, the sake market was seized by
the usual money hungry businessmen:
priests.
Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples dove into the sake business,
and swam in the moldy waters of money.
It turns out, monks were not just experts at sitting around,
they were skilled sake sages,
using their Buddhist powers to make liquor like you’ve never seen.
“Lord Buddha, please grant me the strength to make sake as smooth as my head.”
But really what made shrines and temples so successful
was that they owned a lot of land,
so they had plenty of access to the key ingredients of sake:
rice, water, and poor people.
We still now use those ingredients,
and also many of the brewing techniques they invented.
Leveling up woodworking allowed them to build 1800 liter vats
to brew enough sake to make them forget they were celibate.
Clear sake started in the medieval period.
Before, sake was actually cloudy.
People aged it right after the main mash was done fermenting.
Two new techniques became popular.
One was to filter that cloudy stuff through cloth, making sake clear.
It still had a yellowish brown color because they used unpolished rice.
The second technique got rid of this yellow color…
by polishing the rice.
Before, people used unpolished rice for everything,
or they only polished the rice at the fermentation stage.
What does polishing mean?
Now I need you to put some pillows on the floor around you and grab your seat,
because I’m about to unleash a revelation.
Rice is not naturally white.
After you take off the hull, the rice grain is actually brown.
Or red, or purple, depending on the type, but mostly brown.
This outer layer, called the bran, has fats, proteins,
and fiber that mess with the flavor.
The more you can polish away the outer layer,
the whiter the rice becomes,
and the purer the starch you get.
A technique white supremacists can get behind.
It eventually became the norm to drink filtered, clear sake.
It still wasn’t the same as modern sake.
Back then, it had less water,
making it sweeter and more viscous, more blblblblbl.
It also had more alcohol.
When Europeans came to Japan much later,
what they discovered blew the wigs right off their heads.
Monks were pasteurizing their sake,
heating it up to kill microbes and prevent spoiling.
They had been doing it for centuries.
Meanwhile, Louis Pasteur only patented the process in 1865.
In the 1500s, brewing became a huge industry,
with rich independent businesses not even
tied to temples or shrines.
Get your gas masks and signs ready,
because there was another sake revolution in the Edo Period [1603 - 1868].
Throughout Japanese history, commoners, especially farmers,
made a lot of money--
I mean, they’re so poor it’s funny.
Many couldn’t live off their lands all year.
So in the winter when there wasn’t much farming to do,
some commoners would travel to a sake region,
a place where people from far away got together to brew and sell sake.
Sake brewing regions and sake groups grew,
developing their own systems and unique tastes.
In the 1800s, one of these regions became the center of sake in Japan.
It’s now called Nada-gogō 灘五郷, or the “Five Villages of Nada,”
a magical place where you can find famous sake masters
just roaming the street right next to you,
aimlessly, because they’re absolutely smashed.
One of the reasons this area became so famous
was due to something that only exists in one of the villages,
Nishinomiya.
Brewers noticed that the sake made at Nishinomiya
was always better than elsewhere.
According to sake legends, this one dude named Yamamura Tazaemon
owned two breweries,
one in Nishinomiya and one in nearby Uozaki.
He put on his lucky underwear and went on a mission
to figure out what was so special about Nishinomiya.
This dude tried everything,
from using the same rice in both breweries to using the same equipment.
He even switched the brewmasters.
But nothing worked.
Then one day, he shipped water from Nishinomiya to his other brewery, and
BABOOM,
the sake from loser brewery came out just as good.
Turns out the well water from Nishinomiya is magic water for sake making.
It has a ton of phosphates and potassium,
which are like Popeye’s fried chicken to koji fungus and yeast.
The Five Villages used the latest tech of water wheels for polishing rice.
Not only was it 40 times faster than foot treadles,
but the rice was higher quality since it was polished so evenly.
The industry was booming.
Big cities like Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo were drowning in sake.
Ships raced each other from the Five Villages to the port of Edo,
delivering sake like they were Amazon and Edo just paid for Prime.
Japanese sake was also exported to places all over Southeast Asia.
After Edo came the Meiji Period, the beginning of modern Japan.
To the Meiji government, sake was a national security issue.
It was an important national drink,
a sacred tradition in Japanese history,
and a Godzilla sized source of taxes.
At one point, the liquor tax made up one-third of tax revenue.
They had to keep the industry going.
The government had a problem though,
sake brewing was dangerous business.
A batch of sake could go bad if bacteria got into the barrels.
Microbes treated wooden barrels like Africa,
always looking for spots to colonize.
That could have meant up to a year of work, wasted.
And once bacteria had colonized a barrel,
traces of it might linger for years,
jeopardizing future batches.
It was such an issue that breweries expected about 10% of every batch to be spoiled.
Another problem was yeast quality.
Brewmasters used the yeast that their breweries accumulated over the years,
veteran yeast.
But microbes can’t be controlled.
One year, the yeast could mutate and give you a sake of s--t.
Brewmasters always said that you couldn’t brew the same sake twice.
You can’t rely on microorganisms for your fiscal policy.
They make terrible economic decisions.
So in 1904, the Meiji government founded the National Research Institute of Brewing.
They spread knowledge of the latest and safest brewing techniques.
They told everyone to drop the dirty wooden tubs
and use steel tanks coated with enamel instead.
They funded breeding of quality sake rice.
Other new techniques were rice polishing machines,
and bottling sake for shipping.
The government held national sake competitions,
and the yeast of the winners were spread far and wide
to level up sake across the country.
Things were going fine until WaWa2 hit.
The worst legacy of WaWa2 was that it destroyed the sake industry.
Many breweries started brewing bombs and rifles.
Rice became hard to get, so brewmasters diluted their sake
by adding water, sugar, acids, or distilled alcohol.
The high dilution made it lower quality, but way cheaper to make.
The industry recovered after the war, and peaked in the 1970s,
but since then it’s been falling, giving way to other drinks like beer and shōchū.
The national drink of Japan is declining in Japan.
There is good news though, sake exports have been doing the opposite.
People outside of Japan are just loving it.
So next time you see a weeb, thank them for keeping sake alive.
They also support another Japanese food industry:
sushi.
The war almost killed this food too,
but starving street vendors managed to save your tuna nigiri.
Click here to find out how.
Don’t forget to go click on my link in the description
to get premium sake sent to your home.
We have some new patrons today:
Jeff Fawcett, AlienAceCat, Ali, and Harmlessfern723.
May your sake cups never run dry.
I love you, and spread the knowledge!