Sake is known as Japanese rice wine, but it’s actually beer

(KansasCity) - The cup of warm sake you’ve probably had up to now bears as much resemblance to good sake as Godzilla films do to great Japanese cinema.

Complexity is available, if you branch out beyond the dreck that many Asian restaurants have offered customers until recently.

Sake is known among the Japanese as rice wine. It’s not a wine though, it’s a beer. Beer is an alcoholic beverage made by converting the starches in a grain into sugar and then fermenting them into alcohol. That’s what is done with rice, in order to make it into sake.

In typical beer production, grains sprout, transforming the kernel’s starches into sugar that the growing seed can use for energy. The grains are mixed with water to make a sweet sort of cereal soup.

Yeasts do the rest, creating the alcohol and the carbon dioxide that provides the foam and tingle. Beers are finished with hop flowers from the hop plant, resulting in flavors, astringency and structure for aging.

Sake’s unique secret is that an enzyme called koji allows the conversion of starch to sugar and the fermentation to happen in the very same tank and nearly at the same moment. Koji — a kind of mold — has been in use for perhaps a thousand years, though no one is clear as to how its use began or by whom.

But the Japanese predilection for calling it a rice wine reflects the myriad faces of sake and the relative flavors, most of them far more akin to wine than beer. Sake styles are as diverse as wine styles, and no less confusing for newbie’s.