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| (sake container tank) |
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| (Kitagawa Honten Brewery) |
When Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a military ruler in the late 16th century built Fushimi Castle and Fushimi castle town, there was a great demand of sake so sake industry flourished so much. Many sake breweries such as Gekkeikan and Kizakura started the business here during the Edo Period. Nowadays, there are about 20 sake breweries in Fushimi. When you walk around Fushimi, a fragrant smell of sake floats on a breath of air.
These are the pictures of sake breweries.
Fushimi prospered as a traffic center between Kyoto and Osaka during the Edo Period. Teradaya was an inn where Sakamoto Ryoma, a high-minded revolutionalist and one of the most popular historic heroes among the Japanese used to stay and is located near the Uji River.
I went to Kitagawa Honten, a sake brewery in Fushimi originated about 350 years ago to see sake making.
They showed us their brewery which is open to the public only on special days in winter. We enjoyed samples of freshly made sake. The website of Kitagawa Honke and their brand Tomio is
http://www.fushimi.or.jp/brewery/kitagawa.html
The authentic way of sake tasting is,
1.Pour wake into a white cup with three blue circles at the bottom.
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| (fresh sake tasting) |
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| (white sake cup) |
2. Smell sake first, hold one mouthful of sake in your tongue and mouth.
3. Drink it.
We played a sake taste guessing game. We drank from four cups of sake with lables on and try to remember the taste. Later we drank four cups of sake without labels and made a guess which sake matched the sake with labels. I was not able to make a good guess at all. It was difficult to remember the taste of each sake.
They explained the process of making sake while taking us to the brewery tour.
1. Rice is polished, washed and put into water for one day.
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| (rice polishing machine) |
2. Rice is steamed with hot vapor and also dry vapor so that rice becomes hard on the surface and soft in the center.
3.Shobo(yeast-starter)making
Steamed rice, water and yeast are put to a container and warmed up at 60 degrees centigrade. Bubbles of carbon dioxide are generated.
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| (shubo making) |
4. Koji(spore)making
Put koji spore on rice and settle the temperature at about 33 degrees centigrade.
5. Moromi Mash making
Yeast starter, Koji rice and water are put into a tank and mixed. It's called 'Parallel combined fermentation' process.
6. Pressing and filtering process
Raw sake is poured into cloth and pressed with air and squeezed.
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| (filtering) |
Their brand sake Eikun is sold at Aburacho at Fushimi Otesuji Covered Shopping Street and other sake shops.
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| (Kitagawa Honten Brewery) |
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| (Aburacho in Fushimi) |
