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I'm Beau Timken, Master Sake Somoa, and we are speaking about Junmai Sake as a category.
Specifically we are talking about rice. Now there is no such thing as white rice. Rice
when you make sake needs to be milled, it needs to be polished. In 1578 the first documentation
of milled or polished rice became recorded. They realized that you could make sake using
brown rice but they realized that the impurities which we would call nutrients, fats, minerals,
proteins, vitamins, everything that rests on the outside of each grain of rice. They
realized that if you removed that the actual fermentation process would be so much better
with kind of a pure starch-like context. So they started making sake using white rice.
Now the difference in flavor between brown rice sake and white rice sake is astounding.
Now that said at the turn of the century, I think 1903, previously brewers were using
water wheel mills to polish or mill rice. Just think about any like old grains and all
the different things they would use water wheel mills to mill or polish rice if you
will. Once they started, once technology caught up with rice essentially, these better production
methods came to head. That is when these different categories of sake really sort of came into
play because it became a little bit of a *** fight. The more you could mill the rice, how
low could you go. It was like the limbo of making something. And these big brewers all
had egos and they all started saying well we're going to mill something to 20% removal,
80% remaining and then it went to, Oh my God they removed 30% of each grain of rice and
eventually they went to you know 40%. Why do you remove all this? This is where you
kind of get into all of the gray area, because it makes a better product or does it make
a better story? Some guys will argue that the soul of the rice is in the middle the
starchy core of the rice. Other guys will say well there is more flavor on the outside
of the rice and this is why Junmai is a great category because you have more of those outside
flavors of the rice, the fats, minerals, lipids, proteins, vitamins on the outside of the rice
and that is why the category, the Junmai category has more of these call it impurities although
they are still refined. That is why Junmais tend to have bigger, more full bodied flavors
and that is why the fascinating category of Junmai is very popular today in Japan.