Homebrew
Tonight after work I need to steam 6 cups of rice and 8 cups of water and 1.5 cups moldy rice (koji). This is for my homebrew alcohol, no not beer, I am making my own sake.
I’ve been making it for a couple of weeks now and it is a bit more involved that I expected. So far its going well and I’m at the point where I am starting to bulk add my rice to the fermentation. This is when its producing its alcohol and converting the sugars in the rice. My air lock is bubbling away non stop, it smells like wine but tastes like sake, just very bitter right now as its mostly yeast and moldy rice.
I keep writing about moldy rice, which is the big difference in brewing sake to brewing beer. In sake there is no malt as rice does not contain any enzymes to convert the starches to sugars like beer grains do, the way around that is with a special kind of mold that breaks down the rice and its byproduct in breaking down the rice is converting the start to sugar which is what we need for fermentation.
The big downside is, it takes a loooooong time to make. In order to ferment the rice you have to make a starter, this takes a couple of days to create the special mold on the rice. The first two weeks creates your base liquid that contains your yeast and some rice. The second step takes four weeks and this is your initial fermentation. The third step is the secondary fermentation which takes another two weeks (and at this point it lives in the fridge). The the final step is to clear it with bentonite clay (takes a few days) then pasteurize it.
This is my first batch, and apparently 10lbs of short grain rice will yield about 3 gallons of sake. I don’t think I’ll drink 3 gallons of sake, but you can switch sake with white wine in cooking and you can even if your lucky have it convert from sake to rice vinegar, which would be really cool.
