The different types of rice

riziere

When entering the world of sake and the rice needed to make it, rice can be broadly divided into two categories: sake rice, intended for making sake, and table rice, intended for eating. A few questions arise spontaneously: can you eat sake rice? Can you still make sake with table rice? How are they fundamentally […]

How Japanese sake is made

Fabrication du saké

1. Polishing the rice The desired element is the heart of the rice, which consists almost exclusively of starch, so the rice grains are first polished to remove their protective layer (the rice bran) and the surface layers where the vitamins, proteins and lipids reside. Although these surface layers are regularly praised in nutrition (whole […]

Understanding the sake categories

Barils de saké

1. The problem of the term ‘polishing’… The Japanese term seimaibuai (精米歩合) is regularly translated (especially by automatic translators) as “polishing” in English. This is a huge misunderstanding, since in English the polishing rate expresses what has been removed, whereas the Japanese term seimaibuai expresses the remaining percentage of the rice grain! Thus, for a […]