Three Ways to Let Go of the Rice

A hundred minutes inside the last sake brewery in the old capital of Kyoto, and the one variable nobody prints on the label.

Kim and Nancy arrive at Sasaki Shuzō in Nishijin with a month of reading behind them and a question about water. What they get is a tour of the well, the milled rice, the mold room and the cold tanks, and then a tasting designed like an experiment: three sakes identical in every way but how they left the mash. Real people, real place, real bottles; the dialogue is what the day would have sounded like. Twenty-two photographs and eleven small infographics on how sake is made and what “quality” measures.

Pages: 40