How to Make Sake at Home

by
Bob Taylor
Taylor-MadeAK Brewing
A Taylor-Made Guide
http://www.taylor-madeak.org/
Table of Contents
Page 2: Introduction
Page 3: About Sake and How Sake is Made
Page 6: The Recipe
Page 7: Ingredients and Equipment
Page 10: Preparing the Rice
Page 11: The Process
Page 16: Secondary and Packaging
Page 18: Drinking Sake and Conclusion
 Introduction
If you Google for homebrew sake or make sake at home, youll get a few hits. But
theyre all really the same poorly written guide. Ive been homebrewing my own sake for
years, and Im really dissatisfied with the quality of the online homebrewing sake guides,
whose process turns out a product that is vastly inferior to commercially made sakes and
even my own home-made product.
Im hoping to change that. This guide will teach you how to make authentic seishu () -
refined Japanese sake - at home, using the kan-zukuri () [cold-brewed] method. While
Im at it, I hope to educate you, at least a little bit, about different varieties of sake and maybe
even different methods for making it. I dont intend for this to be the be-all end-all guide to
sake, but I do hope it will generate some interest in making it at home from ingredients and
equipment that are quite readily available. This is a long guide, with many pages, but
hopefully taking the time to write all those pages will shed some light on a process that
appears to be very complicated on the surface, but really is quite simple at its heart.
This guide is aimed at moderately experienced homebrewers. If youre not a homebrewer,
some terms will be a little unfamiliar to you. A quick Google search will usually define those
words for you, but feel free to post questions in the form of comments on this guide. Ill be
more than happy to answer them for you.

This guide contains quite a few Japanese characters, which wont display
correctly if you dont have the Japanese language pack for your OS installed. If
looks like a couple empty boxes and that bothers you, then set your browser
encoding to Japanese (Shift-JIS) and follow the prompts to install the Japanese
language pack. If it doesnt bother you to have empty boxes in place of certain
characters, then carry on!

Finally, to give credit where its due, everything I know about making sake, I learned from
the book Sake (U.S.A) by Fred Eckhardt. I dont want to duplicate his work in its entirety here,
but the recipe and method presented here are entirely his work. I heartily recommend adding
his book to your library if you find this guide to be at all helpful.
About Sake

Because of its alcohol content and the lack of hops and carbonation, most people refer to
sake as rice wine. This is a contradiction in terms. Wines are always made from fruit,
specifically the grape. Beer always contains hops, some kind of grain, and usually some
amount of carbonation. Sake fits into neither one of these categories, though if you twisted my
arm Id tell you that it would go in the beer category. However, the category that sake really
fits in is jiu - the Chinese word that is the root for all the myriads of other Asians call their
fermented alcoholic rice beverages.
Making Sake
Years ago my first attempt didnt turn out very well. It was very sour, low in alcohol, and
just not very drinkable. Like many of the guides Google turns up, I tried to shortcut the
process by adding all the ingredients at once and fermenting at room temperature. My
excuse, such as it was, for that was I didnt have the right equipment for making sake,
specifically a steamer and a means for controlling the fermentation temperature.
Before you can make sake, you must learn the basic concepts of how sake is made. Lets
start with the ingredients.
Like beer, sake has only 4 ingredients:
Water ()
Rice ()
Kome-koji ()
Yeast ()
Notice the absence of malt there? You cant malt rice for sake making the same way you
malt barley, so the rice doesnt contain any enzymes for converting starch to sugar like malted
barley does. Ill reiterate: rice wont convert itself to sugar for the yeast to ferment. Thats
where kome-koji (just koji for short) comes in.
Koji is rice that has had aspergillus oryzae (koji-kin) mold grown on it. This special mold
has an interesting property: it secretes enzymes that convert starch to sugar. If you add it to a
soupy mash of rice, water, and yeast, the result is fermentation. All that remains is technique.
If I were to list the steps for making sake right away, most of you would close this window
and never come back. At first glance it looks really complex. Hell, my first attempt at sake
turned out horrible largely because I didnt understand the rules of sake making and tried to
oversimplify the process. I guess years of homebrewing experience really does make for a
greater understanding of certain concepts, because when I got back to making sake after
having given up for a few years, the whole convoluted and tradition-steeped process that the
Japanese use to make sake makes sense to me.
 Eventually, I worked it out to simple rules that must be followed to make sake:
Make a yeast starter. Like any other beer (especially lagers), a big healthy yeast
starter is essential for a good sake fermentation. When making sake, this step is called
the Moto or seed mash and the purpose is to get the yeast to reproduce to a good
number and start actively fermenting before you add more rice and koji for the main
fermentation.
Rice must be added in doubling additions. If you add everything at once, your yeast
will just give up before you reach the desired alcohol content of sake. Worse: if your
yeast gives up, other bugs can take over and ruin your sake. So, add rice in additions
that double your fermentation volume each time. Using this method, your homebrewed
sake can reach 18%-20% ABV.
Koji is always added the night before you add your rice addition. Basically, you
add koji to your fermenting sake at the same time that you put your rice in the fridge to
soak for steaming. The purpose is to hydrate the koji so that it will give up its enzymes
to the solution, ready to be soaked up by the steamed rice being added the next day.
Control your fermentation temperature. The closer you get to 50F, the more
dormant lactobacillus becomes. This allows the yeast to take control of the
fermentation and prevents your sake from becoming too sour. Some acidity is
necessary, but too much will render it undrinkable.
Apart from the above rules, there is the method of adding fermentables gradually to the
fermentation. Sake brewing is separated into the following stages:
Moto () - The seed or yeast mash. This is a yeast starter, fellow homebrewers.
Moromi () - The main fermentation, which has three koji and rice additions:
a. Hatsuzoe () - First addition.
b. Nakazoe () - Middle addition.
c. Tomezoe () - Final addition.
Yodan () - Stabilizing addition.
Got all that? Ok, recipe time.
The Recipe
You can probably tell by now, making sake is more about process than ingredients. Even
still, you have to know what you need for ingredients before you can start, right? Heres my
basic recipe for about three gallons of sake, which can be halved or doubled (or tripled lol).
10.00 lbs Short grain white rice
40.00 oz Cold Mountain Rice Koji (2x 20 oz tubs)
2.00 gal Cold water
0.75 tsp Brewer's yeast nutrient
1.00 pinch Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate - MgSO4)
1.25 tsp Morton Salt Substitute (potassium chloride - KCl)
1.00 pack WYeast Sake Yeast

The ratio of the main ingredients in this recipe follows the traditional ratios that
tojis have been using for centuries: koji:rice:water ratio of 25:100:160. That is
2.5 pounds of koji to 10 pounds of rice to 16 pounds of water. You can change
the unit types (pounds, kilograms, whatever) to whatever you like, as long as you
maintain that ratio.

You may notice a few funky ingredients on this list. Those being the salts. Unlike wort
made from barley, rice doesnt contain the minerals and amino acids that yeast needs for a
healthy fermentation. So were supplying those nutrients with the water. Brewers yeast
nutrient for nitrogen, Epsom salts for magnesium, and Moton Salt Substitute for potassium
and chloride. Please note: do not use a different brand of salt substitute without reading the
ingredients list. Most other brands use calcium chloride, which normally isnt a bad thing to
add to a batch of beer, but its not going to supply the potassium that we need here. These
additions arent absolutely necessary (in fact, the current batch of sake detailed in this thread
was made without them), but they help your yeast get a leg up on all other microbes and in
the long run will help to produce the most alcoholic sake possible.
Also conspicuous in its absence is the citric acid, vintners acid blend, or citrus juice that
most of the sake recipes found on the internet call for. Please dont do this to your sake.
Commercial sake brewers dont do it, and neither should you. The stated purpose for this
addition is to protect the sake from infection by lowering the pH. This really isnt necessary
because there is going to be a lactic ferment along with the main yeast ferment that will
acidify the sake for you and, along with the dominant sake yeast, will help to keep all other
microbial activity in check. Citric acid is also a powerful antioxidant, which hurts your yeasts
reproductive cycle. In other words, adding citric acid to your sake is only going to make your
sake more sour, it doesnt serve any other beneficial purpose.
On the next page Ill cover the ingredients in detail, as well as the required equipment.
Ingredients - Strange Names and Where to Buy Them
One by one, here are the ingredients listed in the above recipe and how to find them.
Short Grain Rice - Here in the U.S.A. this variety is often called pearl or California
pearl. The brand I prefer for making sake (and sushi!) is Kokuho Rose Sushi Rice. Its
not expensive, and readily available in grocery stores that cater to ethnic foods. Ive
even seen it at my local Fred Meyer (Kroger to you East Coasters). If you cant find it,
you can use pretty much any short grain rice you can get your hands on.
Ive recently been talking to the folks at F.H. Steinbart Co., a homebrew
supply store based in Oregon. It seems they have a nice deal with
SakOne that allows them to buy some of SakOnes 60% polish rice for
sale to homebrewers. If you want to take a crack at making your own ginjo
sake, thats the rice you want and its reasonably priced too!

Cold Mountain Rice Koji - Without a doubt the most difficult product to find, simply
because you dont know where to look! The first time I attempted sake, I sent my poor
wife around to every Asian market in town looking for this item. She never did find it. I
actually tripped over it at a large local ethnic store called New Sagaya. Really, any
grocery store that caters to a wide range of ethnic interests (especially Japanese) will
have this item - hey, if I can get it in Alaska, its probably available where you live! If
not, there is a web store that sells it pretty cheap. Alternatively, your local homebrew
supply store may stock koji-kin spores. This is more expensive, but you can make your
own kome-koji with it and one packet makes enough for several batches of sake. Push
comes to shove, you can always order it (scroll all the way down to the bottom of the
page).
I want to point out here that in this recipe we are actually using 12.5
pounds of rice: 25% of our rice is in the form of koji. This must be taken
into account if you opt to make your own koji from koji-kin and rice. Dont
forget to buy the extra rice! Dont worry, your home-made koji will keep in
the fridge just fine for the two weeks that moto will require.
 Sake Yeast - While were on the subject of homebrew supply stores, youre going to
need some yeast. Youre not going to find sake yeast in a grocery store, so hit the
yellow pages and locate a homebrew supply store near you and see if they stock
WYeast WY3134 Sake #9 yeast. If they dont stock it, and theyre not willing to get it for
you, you can always order it. If you just cant wait, white wine yeast will certainly do the
job. Please dont use bread yeast, though. I know a lot of other online sake homebrew
guides say to use it, and Asian homebrewers do it all the time, but believe me they
wouldnt if homebrewing were legal in Japan.
To date the only true sake yeast available to homebrewers is Wyeast
WY3134 Sake #9. Wyeast doesnt offer a lot of information on this yeast,
so Ill fill you on what some of my own research has turned up. This yeast
is very likely the yeast simply named Number 9 by the Central Brewers
Union of Japan. This yeast was first discovered in 1953 by the Kumamoto
Prefectural Sake Research Center (the brewers of Koro sake), and is often
referred to by the nickname Kumamoto Kobo in honor of its discoverers.
Its the most widely popular yeast among sake kuras all across Japan as
well as in the U.S. for making ginjo sake, especially prized for the fragrant
and fruity aroma and mild level of acidity it creates.

Epsom Salt - Were out of the hard ingredients now. This is available at your local
megamart, usually in the pharmaceuticals or first-aid department. I bet you probably
have some under your bathroom sink or in the medicine cabinet to treat the occasional
pulled muscle, even.
Morton Salt Substitute - Grocery store. Morton is pretty ubiquitous, so you shouldnt
have any reason to even consider a different brand of product. If for some reason you
just cant find this brand, read labels. If you cant find a salt substitute label that lists
potassium chloride, just leave it out. You probably wont miss it.
Experienced all-grain homebrewers will recognize this and the epsom salt
as a simple water treatment - were adjusting our water to imitate optimum
sake brewing water by providing minerals that will directly affect the final
flavor of the sake as well as provide trace minerals that the yeast require.

Water - Only mentioning this because all municipal water sources in our nation are
chlorinated. Sake doesnt have the same issues with chlorophenols that beer does, but
I still prefer to leave the chlorine out. Filter your water or buy distilled (its cheap).
However, if you use distilled or reverse osmosis filtered water, the above mentioned
yeast nutrients and brewing salts are required.
Equipment
You only really need some very basic equipment for making sake. If you have a basic
homebrewing or winemaking equipment kit, youre already most of the way there! Heres a
short list:
Fermenter - A five-gallon, food-grade plastic bucket with a tight-fitting lid that has been
drilled for a fermentation airlock like this one, but the spigot is not necessary (you wont
use it).
A large steamer - Really the only specialized piece of
equipment you need, a large steamer that can hold 3 to 5
pounds of rice would be very nice to have. You could cook
rice with a rice cooker or in a potbut really, sake rice
needs to be steamed. Steamed rice doesnt get mushy
and gluey like boiled rice does, and this is important for the
koji to get hold of it. Large aluminum steamers sell for
about $30 at your local Asian market, so its not a huge
investment. If nothing else a bamboo steamer will do just fine, as long as you line it
with some cheesecloth or even come canvas.
A racking cane and hose - Like beer, sake can be damaged by contact with oxygen,
so siphoning is generally the rule when transferring it between vessels (the exception
being when pressing the lees). This is available at your local homebrew supply store, if
you dont already have one as part of your homebrewing/winemaking equipment.
Airlocks and one-hole stoppers - Again, you want to protect your fermenting sake
from the environment, and thats what these are for. If you bought a homebrewing kit,
you have these already.
Glass jugs of one-gallon capacity - Later in the process youre going to want to get
the sake off of the rice lees, but its not quite ready to drink yet. One-gallon glass jugs
(like the ones good quality juices come in) will serve as perfect secondary fermenters
or bright tanks in which your sake can finish fermenting, clear, and mature.
A means to control fermentation temperature - Every homebrewer dreams of
having a chest freezer with a temperature controller on it dedicated to his beer. I have
one, and I love it. But fulfilling this requirement doesnt necessarily mean you need a
piece of equipment for the job. If you have a basement, garage, or any part of your
home that stays in the 50F-55F temperature range for at least part of the year, that
will do nicely to keep your sake fermenting in the right temperature range for each step
of the process.
On the next page, Ill tell you how to prepare your rice for making sake.
Preparing the Rice

Rice must be cooked before it can be used for making sake. The reason, familiar to all-
grain homebrewers, has to do with gelatinizing the starches in the rice kerels. Gelatinizing
alters the structure of the starch granules in such a way as to make them more readily
soluble. Bottom line: you have to cook the rice before the koji enzymes can do anything else
with it.
The preferred method of preparing rice for sake is steaming. This is because steamed
rice, while fully gelatinized, doesnt have the tendency to go mushy and gooey like normally
cooked rice does. This means that clumps are a lot easier to break up, and your hands will
thank you for that when it comes time to mix the rice into the moromi. If you dont have a
steamer, cant concoct one, and couldnt find one to buy, then cooking in a rice cooker or even
simmering in a pot on the stove is acceptable - so dont let not being able to steam your rice
discourage you!
Dont use boiled or simmered rice for making koji! Boiling or simmering rice
forces a lot more water into the rice than steaming does, which seriously
compromises the rice grains ability to hold any kind of structure. If you use this
cooking method to prepare rice for making koji, the mold will reduce the rice to a
slimy puddle of goo.

You prepare rice for steaming like this: Wash the rice thoroughly in running cold water to
remove all starch powder. Then, cover the rice in 2-3 inches of very cold water, and stash in
your fridge for about 18 hours. Properly soaked rice is slightly less than crunchy and nibbles
easily (if its squishy, you soaked too long. if very crunchy, it hasnt soaked long enough). After
soaking, drain off the cold water in a colander for at least half an hour. Then place the rice in
your steamer (with plenty of water in the bottom half) and steam for 45 minutes. Steamed rice
is tender to the tooth and translucent - not white, like simmered rice.
I realize that this seems like a small subject to devote an entire page to, but it stands by
itself because it deals with the base ingredient of our recipe. Next page: making your sake!
Making Sake, Part II - The Actual Process
Ok, step-by-step, heres how to make a batch of sake.
Moto ()
(Total time: 14 days)
1. Prepare 2.5 cups of cold water by adding 0.75 tsp yeast nutrient and a pinch of Epsom
salt and stirring until completely dissolved. Then add a half cup of koji and stir it into the
water. Put this into the fridge at the same time as you put your rice to soak for
steaming.
2. Prepare 1.5 cups of rice as described on page 5 (wash, soak, steam).
3. After steaming, add the hot rice to the cold koji and water
mixture in your fermenter (theres no reason to use an
intermediate vessel here) to produce a starting temperature
of about 74F. Mix well with a sanitized spoon, and put this
fermenter somewhere where it will remain at this
temperature for the next couple days. Stir twice a day with a
sanitized spoon. In the first few hours the rice will soak up
almost all of the liquid (see image), but after 48 hours the
koji enzymes will cause the rice to liquefy again.
4. After two days, cool to 50-60F and add the yeast on top.
Dont stir the yeast in yet! Cover and let stand for 12 hours.
The cool temperature at this stage is very important (sake
yeast is a lager yeast) - remember the sour flavors I
mentioned earlier? Move the fermenter to your basement or
into a temperature-controlled refrigerator.
5. After 12 hours have gone by, allow the temperature to come
back up to 68-72F and stir the yeast into the moto mixture
with a sanitized spoon. Stir twice a day for 3 days, then
once a day for three more days.
6. The basic ferment of the moto is now finished, and the
temperature should again be lowered to 50F. Allow the
moto to rest for 5 more days. Now you are ready for
moromi fermentation!
Moromi () and Odori ()
(Total time: 26 days)
Fred Ekhardt wrote in his book:
The moromi ferment will be a three-stage buildup over a four day period. The
slow buildup is necessary to ensure a maximum alcohol content. The stages, or
additions, are called first addition (hatsuzoe), middle addition (nakazoe), and
tomezoe or last addition. Each consists of a further portion of koji, steamed rice,
and water. These sequential additions each double the volume of the mash until
the full ferment can take place over about three weeks.

I realize that the timetable of additions I describe here can be a little bit confusing. What
were doing is adding 3 rice additons over 4 days and each addition is going to double the
total volume of our moromi. Ive worked up this handy little example image to illustrate how
this would look on a calendar:

Feel free to refer to this as often as necessary.

Hatsuzoe (): (Day 1 - 2)
1. Day -1: Eighteen hours before you expect to add this
addition (thats going to be on the 14th day of the moto),
wash and soak 2.5 cups of rice in cold water. At the same
time, add a cup of koji to the moto, which has now been
working for 2 weeks. Stir the koji in with a sanitized spoon.
2. Day 1: After soaking, prepare the rice with the usual
steaming method. While the rice is steaming, dissolve 1.25
teaspoon of Morton salt substitute (or potassium chloride) in
a little warm water, then add more cold water to make a total of 2.75 cups. Stash this in
the fridge to chill.
3. Day 1: When finished steaming, add the rice to the above
cold water to cool the rice down. When the rice gets down
below 85F, add it to the moto
4. Day 1 - 2 Long-time beer makers hate this step. Wash your
hands and arms really really well, then use them (yes, your
hands) to mix the steamed rice into your moto, making sure
to break up all the clumps. This should take you about 30
minutes or so. When youre done, put the lid and airlock
back on and keep the temperature at around 70F. Stir with a sanitized spoon at 2 hour
intervals for the next 12 hours, then twice a day for the next 2 days. You have now
tripled the volume of your original moto.
Nakazoe (): (Day 2 - 3)
1. Day 2: 18 hours early, wash and soak 6 cups of rice. At the
same time, add 1.5 cups of koji to the fermenter. Stir it in
with a sanitized spoon.
2. Day 3: Steam your rice as usual. Then add the hot steamed
rice to 8.75 cups of cold water. Mix with your clean hands,
then add the whole thing to the fermenter. Again, mix with
your hands for 30 minutes, being sure to break up all the
clumps.
3. Day 3:Put the lid back on, keep the temperature at about 70F, and stir it up after 12
hours. By now your volume is about 2 gallons.
Tomezoe (): (Day 3 - 4)
1. Day 3: After you stir the mash up in the last step, add the
remaining koji and stir it in. At the same time, wash and
soak the remaining 5 pounds of rice.

2. Day 4: The next day, 24 hours after starting the nakazoe

step, steam your rice. Add the hot steamed rice to 1 gallon
+ 1 cup of cold water, mix with your clean hands, and add
the whole lot to the moromi. Again, mix it up with your
hands, making sure to break up all the clumps. This will
again double your volume to around 4 gallons. Leave this
alone at 70F over night. At this time you can observe odori
- the dancing ferment. The bubbling action of happy
yeasties is a familiar sight to anyone who has made their
own beer before.

From the fifth day on, you want to maintain a cooler temperature for the fermentation. After
the room-temperature overnight period between days 4 and 5, you should chill it down to as
close to 50F as you can get, or at least keep it between 50F and 60F. Believe me, you want
to ferment this cool. A warm sake fermentation can lead to some funky flavors, so try to avoid
it. This is why the Japanese traditionally only made sake during the cold winter months, which
is why this is called the kan-zukuri () or cold-brewed method. Stir at 12 hour intervals
through the 6th day, then leave it alone for the next three weeks. Somewhere between day 19
and day 21, the fermentation should pretty much be over (a hydrometer would read at 1.000
or less at this point).
Note that, since theres no way to determine an original gravity for sake, its not really
possible to calculate ABV for the product. Youll know its alcoholic when you taste it, though!
Ok, on to the next step:
Yodan ()
(Total time: a few hours to a day)
The stabilizing addition. I only mention this for sake of completeness, as I always skip it
because I prefer the driest and most alcoholic sake possible. There are two ways you can go
here: you can add water to decrease the alcoholic strength of the product, or you can add rice
and koji to sweeten the sake. Here are the calculated water additions:
0 ounces - If you add no water in this step, the sake should finish with an alcohol
content above 18.5% ABV. This is Genshu () sake.
30 ounces - This will yield about 16% ABV, which we could call ordinary sake.
68 ounces - The alcohol level will decrease to about 14% ABV. This is pretty weak for
a non-carbonated product, and generally not recommended.
20 ounces - Add two gallons of water and youll be down to about 12% ABV, which is
the usual strength of fruit-flavored sakes.
178 ounces - This will yield 10-11% ABV, which is low enough to allow you to bottle
condition the sake for a carbonated product.
Why would you do this? Got me, Im just parroting the math. Ive never done any of these
water additions.
Last, but certainly not least, adding 2 cups (uncooked amount) of steamed rice and 1/2
cup of koji to the sake at this point will add more sugar than the yeast can ferment, which will
sweeten the sake. This amount of rice and koji will produce a very sweet sake called mirin,
which is used in Japanese cooking to make such things as teriyaki sauce. Basically, the
Japanese tend to use mirin in place of sugar wherever a sweetener is needed. If you prefer
your sake to be sweeter, but not so sweet as mirin, you can decrease the amount of rice
added in this step.
Next page: maturation and packaging.
Secondary and Maturation (Bright Tank)
(Total time: 14 days)
If you made no additions at yodan, then you should rack the
sake at this time. Clean and sanitize three one-gallon jugs, your
racking cane and hose, and one-hole stoppers for the jugs. Then
just siphon the sake off of the rice lees. Then take the lees and put
them in a colander lined with cheesecloth, wrap it up, and squeeze
as much liquid out as you can (if you have a small fruit press or
even just a nylon grain bag, this works even better). Use this to top
up your jugs to the neck (dont fill them completely full).

If you want some nigorizake (cloudy sake) to drink, this is the time to draw it off,
bottle, and pasteurize it. See how that works? You dont have to commit an entire
batch to it!

Affix stoppers and airlocks to these jugs, then keep them right
at that 50F temperature for the next couple weeks. This will allow
any residual fermentation to finish up and will allow the rice solids
and yeast to settle out, leaving your sake relatively clear.
At this point you could just put a tight lid on your jugs of sake
and store it in your fridge for anywhere from 2 weeks to a month
before you drink it all. I seriously dont recommend this because
any longer and lactobacillus can take over and turn your sake
very, very sour. The next step is pasteurization.
Pasteurizing sake is pretty easy. Just put your sake into a pot
of water on your stove, stick a thermometer in through the mouth
of the bottle, and heat until the sake reaches 140F. Then take it
out, put a lid on it, and allow it to cool. The resulting pasteurized
sake can be stored for up to 6 months before drinking or
repackaging.
Packaging for Consumption
Right now you have a couple options:
After aging, you can leave the sake as-is (or mix the sediment into solution and rack to
smaller bottles, followed by re-pasteurizing and sealing) and enjoy it as nigorizake () -
cloudy sake that is meant to have the sediment mixed into the sake before drinking. This kind
of sake is sweeter and has more body than filtered sake, and is very delicious in and of itself.
Or you can allow the jugs to become well-settled and carefully
rack the cleared sake off of the sediment into smaller bottles, re-
pasteurize, and seal. This is muroka () or unfiltered sake -
seishu that hasnt been further clarified by filtration. Its still a little
hazy, and thats generally considered to be unacceptable for
seishu. To render this sake brilliant, I suggest fining with bentonite
- a type of clay used by vintners to clarify their white wines.
The ratio of bentonite used is generally 1/2 teaspoon per gallon
being fined - for our recipe, that works out to 1.5 teaspoons
bentonite. Start with a cup (8 fluid ounces) of really hot water.
Stirring continuously with a whisk, slowly sprinkle the bentonite
powder into the water. Once you have it all in a smooth slurry,
gently stir it into your sake in its secondary fermenter (split it up if
youre using multiple jugs as secondaries). In about 3 days it will
completely settle out and you can rack the brilliant sake off of the
sediment for bottling and pasteurizing. There is, by the way,
absolutely no reason why you cant do this during the first
pasteurization step in this process.
Sake is ready to drink any time after its bottled, but a modest
aging period of about two months tends to improve the flavor.
Traditionally, sake is aged at the brewery for six months in this
stage of production, before filtering, bottling, and re-pasteurizing
the product for sale. But Im not going to suggest anything so
extreme here, aging for 6 weeks to two months will be sufficient to
get rid of the green sake flavors.

Thus we come to the eighth and final page of my guide: drinking your sake!
Drinking Sake
A lot of people I talk to are a bit in the dark about how to drink sake. I will now attempt to
light the way for you! Homebrewed sake can be drank warm or chilled, and is great either
way.
Drinking chilled sake: Chilled sake is traditionally drunk from 6 oz square cedar (or
cypress) cups called masu. Usually a bit of salt is sprinkled on the rim, symbolizing food
(sakana). Traditionally, sake is never consumed without food, so putting salt on your cup is
just a way to allow you to drink sake by itself! The cedar masu add its own complementing
flavor to the sake, but can overwhelm more delicately flavored ginjo sakes; for which a
laquerware alternative is available.
Drinking warm sake: Restaurants use a sake machine through
which hot sake is dispensed from 18 liter boxes for consumption by their
American patrons. Warm sake is good, but these machines heat the sake
up to almost boiling and keep it there for far too long as it dispenses. This
is far too hot to drink, and actually ruins the sake - changing the flavor and
boiling the alcohol out of it. The same thing often happens if you try to
warm sake up in the microwave if you arent careful, actually.
The proper warm temperature to drink sake at is just barely warmer
than your blood: 110F-120F. To warm it up, put a small pan of water on the stove and bring
to a boil. While youre waiting, pour some sake into the tokkuri (flask) of your favorite sake
set, and put a thermometer in it. When the water boils, remove from the stove and put your
tokkuri full of sake in the hot water. Gently heat until the thermometer reads the appropriate
temperature, then immediately serve, sipping it from the ochoko (cups) that are part of your
set.
Conclusion
Well, I hope you found this guide to be much more helpful than those other guides that
Google turns up. As stated at the beginning, Im always happy to answer questions - so if you
have them, feel free to send me an e-mail at homebrew@taylor-madeak.org and I will do my
very best to answer your questions for you in as clear a manner as possible.

Happy Brewing!
-]Bob Taylor, Taylor-MadeAK Brewing