Drinking– category –

You carry a bottle home from a liquor shop, and a small worry starts. Should it go in the fridge, or is the cupboard fine? Knowing how to store sake answers that question, and it takes only a few habits. In short, sake keeps best when it...

Pour a glass of sake and take a sip. Then try to say what you noticed. Most people stall right there, because nobody taught them what to look for. This guide on how to taste sake fixes that gap with six simple steps. To taste sake, first...

Pour the same sake into three vessels: a small ceramic cup, a straight-sided glass and a wine glass. Then smell each one. The sake has not changed, yet the three pours may not seem the same. One might seem quieter, another brighter. This...

A plate of salt-grilled fish arrives, its skin still crackling. You take a sip of sake, then a bite of fish, then another sip. Somehow the fish tastes richer and the sake feels cleaner. Why does that happen, and can you make it happen on...

You sit down at a small izakaya counter, and the staff slide over a menu with a long column of kanji. Some words look familiar from bottle labels, while others do not. Meanwhile, someone nearby is sipping something warm from a tiny cup, ...

You pick up a bottle in a Japanese liquor shop and turn it around. On the back, you find a column of kanji and numbers: Junmai Ginjo, 55%, 15%, Yamada Nishiki, +3. So learning how to read a sake label means spotting which clues matter, a...