kan-zukuri– tag –

In 1697, roughly 640,000 casks of sake arrived in Edo by sea. Almost none of it came from Nada, although that district later dominated Japanese brewing. Edo period sake is not really a story about better brewing, since most of the key te...

The history of sake stretches back roughly two thousand years, at least if you use the word broadly for Japanese alcoholic drinks made from rice. Yet the earliest rice-based drinks were nothing like modern nihonshu. The sake people pour ...

Kan-zukuri is the traditional practice of brewing sake during the coldest months of the year. The cold does real work here. Low temperatures slow fermentation, keep it stable, and hold unwanted microbes in check. For centuries, this made...