SC - The making of Sake

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Christine A Seelye-King wrote:
> 
> We recall having run across a recipie for making your own brewed sake.
> Of course, now that we go looking for it, it is nowhere to be found.
> Does anyone out there have a recipie to make rice wine, aka sake?
> Thanks,
>         Christianna

I believe there is a rice wine recipe in that 14th-century Chinese
recipe collection published recently in PPC. It seems to bear little
resemblance to what now passes for sake, or even the rice wines of other
cultures, including modern Chinese.

Asian rice wines are generally made by either A) malting and mashing
your rice, as for beer, B) malting a small percentage of barley or other
high-amylase grain, and mashing it with (cooked) rice, or C) cooking
rice, cooling and grinding it, and forming it into little conical cakes,
which you infect with a particular starch-eating mold (I'm sure I have
the name of that somewhere), which breaks down an astonishing amount of
the rice's mass (since it's mostly starch) and converts it into a sugar
syrup, which can then be fermented with airborne yeasts or a specific
yeast culture. You can buy a sake yeast in home brew supply shops, and
most good Chinese groceries sell what is known as rice wine pills,
which, AFAIK, are just the mold needed to convert the starch to sugar.
There's probably a Japanese equivalent product, but I don't know what it
is called.

Korean rice wines appear to be made by mashing cooked unmalted rice with
either rice or wheat malt, which you can buy in the Korean grocery, in
bags labelled "NOT TO BE USED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF ALCOHOLIC
BEVERAGES". I asked a Korean lady nearby, once, "You use this stuff to
make wine?" She said, "Oh. Yes, of course."

Then there's the ultimate cheater's method, which is to buy rice malt
syrup in the Chinese grocery (often used on spare ribs and Peking Duck
in Chinese restaurants), dilute it to a reasonable gravity with water,
and add either sake yeast or some other good brewing/vintning yeast. The
best rice wine I ever made was a mixture of syrup I made from cooked
rice and rice wine pills, rice syrup made by mashing cooked rice with
malted wheat, _and_ commercial rice maltose, fermented with Epernet 2
wine yeast, which gave it some nice fruity, vaguely European esters in
it. It ended up being a clear, pale straw color, somewhat lighter in
body than sake, and less sweet.  
 
I realize this is not a recipe per se, but in hopes it might help jog
some memory or encourage experimentation...

Adamantius (who might be able to send some Chinese rice wine pills via
Mistress Gabrielle to Pennsic)
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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