Term · Japanese culture
Sake
The rice drink everyone outside Japan calls by a word that, inside Japan, means any alcohol at all.
In Otakana the clue reads: Rice wine served warm or cold
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 4 · Easy
Brewing it takes a mould. Koji is grown on steamed rice to break the starch into sugar, and yeast then works on that sugar in the same tank at the same time, a double process that few drinks anywhere attempt. Rice gets polished first, and how much of each grain is milled away decides the grade. Junmai means rice and water alone, daiginjo means the grain was polished past half its weight.
Serving temperature is a real decision rather than a default. Cheap sake improves warmed. A good ginjo is served cool because heat destroys the fruit smell that the brewer worked for. It is poured for others rather than for yourself, which turns a table into a small system of attention, and holding your cup up to be filled is the polite half of it.
Ask for sake in a Japanese bar and you may get beer, since the word covers alcohol generally. The rice drink is nihonshu when precision matters. Production has been shrinking for decades as domestic drinking falls, while exports climb, which means the best bottles increasingly leave the country.
Spelling SAKE
SAKE is four letters and it is already an English word with a completely unrelated meaning, as in for the sake of. Pronunciation splits the two: the Japanese ends on a sounded E, sa-ke, and never rhymes with khaki. No long vowels and nothing doubled. Four letters gives you very little room, so open with something that tests vowels.