Akashi Tai Tokubetsu Honjozo Sake, 72 cl

Product Information

However, when you start warming the sake up, it becomes much more enjoyable. The acidity melts down with the sweetness making the taste more mellow and gentle. The spiciness from alcohol becomes more prominent but without a strong alcohol aftertaste.

Located in Hyogo prefecture, Akashi-Tai is a small craft brewery making beside sake Hatozaki whiskey and 135°East gin at its Kaikyo distiller. Despite its modest size, the brewery has a very good presence in the UK.

A Word from our Toji

Helpful as these categories are, they offer only a vague sense of the breadth and variety available, even within each category. The only way to really find out what you like is to taste broadly and see what lights up your palette. Brewing superior sake by hand requires all five senses to perfect with the natural processes of fermentation and flavour development. Surely, Hakusturu Excellent Junmai has it in the name. The sake is really excellent, affordable and versatile. You can enjoy it at any temperature. Chilled, it has a light aroma of grapefruit, toasted rice and green apple. When you drink Hakusturu Excellent Junmai straight out of the fridge, the sake is off-dry with pleasant acidity and light vanilla and Bromley apple notes. The sake is medium-bodied, with a silky texture and a long nice finish.

The Tedorigawa brewery makes a wide range of excellent sake from classy Ika na Onna to sweet and clean Kinka and mellow Yamahai Junmai Daiginjo. You can enjoy all of them at various temperatures. But Tedorigawa Yamahai Junmai was probably specifically made to drink warm. Akashi Tai Junmai Ginjo Sparkling Sake is made using only locally grown rice from the Hyogo Prefecture. Ginjo is a premium type of Sake made with rice that has to have at least 40% of the outside of the rice grains (the bran) polished away. Junmai means no distillers alcohol is added which it can be in other Sakes e.g. Honjozo Sake. The Sake undergoes a careful, low temperature fermentation and it is then undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle with some more koji (the fungus used in fermentation process) to produce the fizz. The sake is carefully fermented at low temperature and it is allowed to undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle with some more koji (the fungus used in fermentation process). When you try Tedorigawa Yamahai Junmai chilled, you taste its high acidity straight away. It has a nice creamy texture and is quite a mouthful feel with a long finish with a vanilla aftertaste. You can notice prunes and apple crumble flavours and the taste in general quite deep.That flavour is dictated by each brewery's toji – the sake master. Unlike wine, where taste is as much about the soil as the choice of grapes and which kind of wood it's aged in, sake is purely about ingredients and technique, rather than terroir. We at Akashi Sake Brewery pride ourselves on maintaining a traditional handcrafted approach to creating the finest Japanese sake. I have featured Akashi-Tai sake before as I quite like it. However, it’s the first time I tried Akashi-Tai Tokubetsu Junmai. I asked Miho san, who represents the brewery here, what her favourite temperature for drinking this sake. “Make it really hot!” she replied. So I started with 50C and wasn’t disappointed. Due to the Japanese wanting to become more western, wanting to drink beers and whiskey and cognacs, the poor little sake brewers have really had a hard time," says Cheong-Thong. The thinning out has, however, had the unexpected benefit of improving production standards, and slowly sake's popularity is rebounding as more premium examples appear, in which history meets modern brewing techniques. Again, I tried the sake at various temperatures and room to warm were the best in my opinion. Jidai has a deep and rich taste and high acidity, especially when you drink it chilled or at room temperature. However, the higher you heat it up, the more mellow it becomes.

Japan's signature drink has been brewed for around as long as hanami celebrations have existed, with historians dating its invention to the Nara period (710-794), although booze of various forms has been drunk on the island from at least the third century.While people outside Japan are just catching on to the great potential of sake and food matching, it’s a known fact in sake’s homeland that it can all but transform a meal. What’s more, it goes with a variety of dishes beyond what we might think of as its classic partner, sushi. As the Japanese saying goes, “sake and food never fight”. The different temperatures provide a changing array of flavours for the palate to appreciate. Warm sake is rather unusual in the world of alcoholic beverages, but it has a long history. As a category, sake may still have an air of mystery about it – but with Akashi-Tai’s focus on quality, flavour and true craftsmanship, the brewery is proving that it’s certainly one worth investigating.

You can drink Tedorigawa Yamahai Junmai chilled but it doesn’t give it justice. Made by using a yamahai method, the sake acidity at 1.6 and SMV +2.0. It’s not that aromatic which is normal for junmai sake with gentle green tomatoes, rice, lemon and timber notes. Akashi-Tai Honjozo sake is made to be slightly lighter in style than their other types of sake, using high quality rice and a small amount of brewers alcohol to create a crisp, dry and easy to drink sake.

Akashi-Tai Tokubestu Junmai is quite pleasant chilled. It has an elegant but subtle aroma with notes of apple, elderflower and rice. The sake is quite acidic and dry with a simple taste, creamy texture and short but pleasant finish. While a degree of snobbery endures, there's logic behind the idea that you heat cheap sake and chill the expensive stuff. "If you heat fruity, light, floral sake, all you're going to get is alcohol fumes," says Cheong-Thong. Sakes with more body, or bottles which have been open a while, work well warmed to around 50 degrees, as the heat smooths out some of the rougher notes. "The flavours will still be in the sake, although the alcohol hits you first. Also, it's a very good way to liven up slightly stale sake." How we test sake As relevant now as it was then, Akashi-tai continues to be a market-leader and relentless tailblazer of authentic, Japanese sake. If you fancy a taste of something new, or enjoy the odd sake and want a prime example, you’re in the right place. Kanpai! Akashi aren’t traditional or artisan in a manner that would hinder them, however, and they have embraced modern innovations such as temperature controlled fermentation in recent years. The more recent progressive outlook led Akashi to individual discoveries and ideas, the prime example probably being the ‘Genmai Aged Sake’; Japan’s first ever brown rice sake. Bottled and released in 2005 following its inception in 2002, ‘Genmai Aged Sake’ represents a truly novel concept, using unpolished (brown) rice that’s aged for a unusually long time.