Ask anyone who knows Kyoto's sake where to go, and the answer is Fushimi, the canal town south of the city where a cluster of famous breweries still draws on the soft groundwater that made the district's name. For one bottle the answer is different. West of the Imperial Palace, in Nishijin, a neighbourhood known for its silk looms, Sasaki Sake Brewery still brews inside the old city, on water of its own.
Nishijin takes its name from the western camp of the Onin War, fought through the streets of Kyoto from 1467, and its trade is Nishijin-ori, the brocade woven on its looms for Kyoto's most formal kimono. A visitor walking its lanes listens for the clatter of a loom, and on one corner smells steaming rice instead.
the street called demizu
The brewery on the street called Demizu
Sasaki Sake Brewery was founded in 1893 on the southern edge of the site of Jurakudai, the palace Toyotomi Hideyoshi completed in 1587 as his seat in the capital. A register of 1425 lists 342 sake brewers in and around Kyoto; Sasaki is the only one left inside rakuchu, the old city that Hideyoshi enclosed with earthen ramparts in 1591. The neighbourhood is called Demizu, written with the characters for water coming out, and the name describes the ground exactly. Sasaki draws its brewing water from the same underground water as Kinmeisui and Ginmeisui, the two springs of the palace.
Sen no Rikyu, the tea master who fixed the form of the tea ceremony, is said to have drawn from those springs for the tea he served at Jurakudai, some three hundred years before Sasaki's first brew. Hideyoshi had the palace pulled down in 1595, only eight years after it was finished, and its halls and gates were carried off to temples across the city. The brewery keeps the palace in the name of its principal label, Jurakudai. Beside it stand a label called Nishijin, for the district, and one called Koto, the old capital, which Kawabata Yasunari, the author of the novel of that name, is said to have called the taste of Kyoto.
The brewery's own company profile counts twenty-five employees, the cat included.
what the water decides
What the water decides before the rice does
Fushimi's fame rests on the same principle. Its water, known locally as Fushimizu, is soft, low in the minerals that give a sake sharp edges, and the sake brewed from it has long been called onna-zake, feminine sake, for its smoothness. The hard water of Nada in Hyōgo, miyamizu, makes a bolder sake, called otoko-zake in return. Fushimi, Nada and Saijo in Hiroshima are spoken of together as Japan's three great brewing regions, and the difference between them starts underground, before a single grain of rice is polished.
Fushimi deserves its afternoon. Some twenty breweries still work there, Gekkeikan among them, founded in 1637, and their white-walled kura stand along a willow-lined canal where flat-bottomed boats once carried rice and sake towards Osaka. At Gokonomiya Shrine the spring that gave the shrine its name, Gokosui, the fragrant water, runs from a spout in the precinct. It dried up in the Meiji era, was restored by the neighbourhood in the early 1980s, and in 1985 was chosen as one of Japan's hundred remarkable waters, and people still come with bottles to fill.
Polishing is where the craft becomes visible. The grades of fine sake, ginjo and the more exacting daiginjo, are defined chiefly by how much of the rice grain is milled away before brewing: at least forty per cent of it for a ginjo, at least half for a daiginjo. The outer layers carry the fats and proteins that would cloud the flavour, and the starch the brewer wants lies at the core. The rice most prized for this work is Yamada Nishiki, registered in Hyōgo in 1936 for its large grain and a compact core that survives heavy milling intact, and brewers in Kyoto and Hyōgo compete for it every year.
In beer, starch is turned to sugar in one stage and the sugar is fermented in another. Sake does both in the same tank at once: the koji mould breaks the starch of the rice down into sugar while the yeast turns that sugar into alcohol. Brewers call it multiple parallel fermentation, and it is why an undiluted sake can reach eighteen or twenty per cent alcohol, among the strongest of all brewed drinks. The toji, the master brewer, judges by experience when the mash has gone far enough to press. For generations many of the breweries of Kyoto and Nada hired their toji from the Tanba guild, brewers from the hill country north-west of the city who came down each winter and lived at the kura until the season ended.
The method is the same in Fushimi and in Nishijin. What a practised drinker tastes between the two is the water each brewery inherited.
how it is served
How sake is served and drunk
Sake is drunk from a sakazuki, a shallow, wide-mouthed cup that opens the liquid to more air than a Western glass would, and the same bottle changes with its temperature. Reishu, chilled, sharpens a delicate junmai ginjo; atsukan, warmed, rounds out a fuller one and belongs to the colder months. Neither is more correct, and a good server chooses by the sake and the month.
Warm sake comes to the table in a tokkuri, a narrow-necked ceramic flask, and is poured into small cups called choko, and by custom no one pours for himself: each guest fills a neighbour's cup and has his own filled in return. In an izakaya the glass may be stood in a square wooden masu and filled until it overflows into the box, a show of generosity called mokkiri.
The brewing year has its own first taste. Shiboritate is the sake pressed at the start of the season and sold young, often unpasteurised, with an edge that ageing would smooth away. Nigori, left cloudy with the fine lees of the rice, carries a sweetness and weight the clear styles never have. A kaiseki dinner will often move through more than one sake across its courses, a chilled ginjo with the delicate early dishes and a warmer, rounder pour with the grilled course near the end.
Sasaki's kura opens to visitors by advance reservation, for a guided walk through the brewery and a tasting of what it makes.
The water is the reason to drink sake where it is made, beside the tanks, with the brewer pouring. The Custom Tour of Japan is created from a blank page for one party, and it makes a day of exactly that. On the coast below Kobe, where the brewers of Nada have made sake for centuries from miyamizu, a brewer takes the party through the cellars and pours the year's sake beside the tanks it came from, with a Tour Director interpreting every answer.
