Kensuke Shichida, the head of a centuries-old sake brewery in southern Japan, had spent a dizzying week in London restaurants tasting a variety of exotic and confounding dishes: pub food, gourmet burgers, French food, Angus beef, ceviche.
The experience left him slightly bewildered and slightly ill, he said, suffering from a food hangover.
But Shichida, 43, is on a mission, he said, to bring his family-brewed sake to European restaurants and pair it with Western cuisine, which means charting new territory. It is an exercise of necessity. Japan is proud of its sake heritage, but sales have been falling for decades, and Shichida and a number of other brewers are trying to help reverse its decline before it is too late.
Photo: AFP
“I’d be lying if I said pairing sake with burgers didn’t hurt my pride as a Japanese,” he admitted at a recent dinner, hesitantly poking a piece of lamb kidney and sweetbreads — a first for him — with his fork. “But we need to be exploring this path to survive as a brewer.”
“Sake is surprisingly versatile,” he added. “I’ve discovered it goes well with many Western recipes, perhaps even better than wine or beer.”
Fresh oysters, for example, usually go hand in hand with Champagne or Chablis, which have a crisp acidity. But Shichida, who runs the 140-year-old Tenzan brewery, believes that sake works better. The drink is mellower and less acidic, and its cleansing properties help remove the oysters’ briny taste, he said. And sake’s umami — a savory sensation considered to be the “fifth taste” — helps improve their fleshiness.
Photo: AFP
At a recent dinner at Hixter, a restaurant here, the head chef, Ronnie Murray, paired a plate of Launceston lamb and meaty girolle mushrooms with Shichida’s 75 Junmai, a full-bodied sake that uses unpolished rice, a rarity even in Japan. The Japanese generally prize sake that contains highly polished rice, which produces a flowery and smooth taste. By contrast, Shichida’s sake had a round, woody flavor with a tempered acidity that complemented the lamb’s earthiness.
“Wine tends to be more acidic and cuts through the taste of meat,” said Gareth Groves, the head of marketing at Bibendum Wine, a retailer that recently announced that it was stocking premium sake from Japan. “Sake is less about cutting through the food than sitting alongside it.”
Most Westerners generally view sake as a clear-colored liquor to be savored with sushi and sashimi, with an alcohol content between 15 and 20 percent. It is thought to have originated in the seventh century and is considered the drink of the gods in the Shinto religion.
There are 80 types of rice specially designed to produce sake, which is made from fermented rice, water and koji — white rice imbued with a special kind of mold. While wine is typically served only in glasses, sake can be poured into a variety of cups that alter its fragrance, including earthenware, lacquerware, glass, porcelain and box-shaped ones made from Japanese cedar.
Sake ranges from sparkling, somewhat similar to Champagne, to namazake, which tastes best straight from the vat, unpasteurized. Meaning “raw sake,” namazake offers a taste of the ethereal, as it can sour within hours. Some other sake uses yuzu, a Japanese citrus, making the drink a tangy cousin of the Italian limoncello, while umeshu is kind of a plummy version of the Hungarian dessert wine Tokaj.
Some lesser-known koshu, or aged sake, sells for more than US$300 a bottle for a 40-year-old vintage. Shigeri Shiraki, whose family brewery in the mountainous region of Gifu was founded in 1835, is exploring how to make her 20-year-old aged sake, Daruma Masamune, palatable to Westerners. It is brewed manually by a handful of employees, and only in the winter, a practice among koshu brewers that dates to the 17th century. Shiraki said her brewery does not use refrigerators.
On its own, her sake has a salty undertone reminiscent of soy sauce or Marmite, and it shares notes with port, sherry or the smoky-flavored Islay Scotch whisky. Shiraki suggested pairing it with a particularly rich dessert, pouring it over a slice of pecan pie and vanilla ice cream, or trying it as a digestive.
Some chefs and food lovers describe the experiment with sake as a shot in the dark, but for brewers, the challenge is more urgent.
Sake consumption has fallen sharply in Japan since the 1970s because of a decreasing birthrate and a switch by many drinkers to wine, much of it imported, or other domestic drinks like beer, whiskey or shochu, a Japanese spirit. Japan exported 5,000 tons of sake in 2012, but mostly to Japanese restaurants, limiting its audience. Overseas sales are still a small fraction of total sales.
The number of brewers — mostly old-fashioned and family-owned — has shrunk to around 1,000 from around 4,600 in the earlier part of the 20th century.
“The sake industry won’t survive on its local market,” said Barry McCaughley, a food and beverage consultant based in London. “Unless it makes changes now, it will be dead in 20 to 30 years.”
Restaurants and retailers are starting to push sake as the next drink fad, similar to craft beer, whose popularity has exploded in Britain. A Scottish brewer, Arran, plans to start producing Britain’s first sake on a commercial scale later this year, the second European brewer to do so after Nogne O of Norway. Many bars are already using sake in their cocktails.
For all the gambling on foreign sales, brewers say they have one ultimate aim: bringing sake back in Japan as well.
“If we’re able to tell the Japanese, ‘Look how much foreigners are enjoying sake,’ that would give them an opportunity to rediscover sake and revive demand,” Shichida said. “We don’t want our culture to disappear. We really don’t.”
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