Sake in Kobe & Kyoto

Video Transcript

"I'm Beau Timken, master sake sommelier, and in this segment we're speaking a little bit about the history of sake. As we learned, sake went from the Imperial Court out to the temples and shrines, and eventually back to the villages--back to the homes of many of these brewers where they started brewing local sake. Now, here's the great point, great juncture, in the whole makeup and the history of sake. Some areas have better resources than others for making sake. And what we saw is two major brewing centers emerge out of all the different communities, out of all the different villages that were brewing, two became extremely popular for making sakes that were infinitely better than the other brewers. And the reason being was the water. And the two areas were Kyoto and specifically Fushimi area of Kyoto, and then Kobe. Now, both of these brewing areas have superb brewing water, and as we'll learn, the brews that they made differed from all other sakes because of the quality and the way that that water fermented and made the final product. And so these two centers became, and are still today, the largest producing areas. And we talk about a microbrewery versus a macro brewery. Well these little microbreweries in Fushimi and in Kobe, are now massive breweries because they made the best sake at the time, and they grew and they grew. Kobe also was a port that would send a lot of its sake up to Tokyo, and it was one of these areas that today, if you ask anybody kind of where were the genesis--where were the great brewing centers of all time in history, they'd either say it was Kyoto, which was very known for feminine, soft water, or Kobe, which is known for a little more harder, more masculine water. So two styles emerged. Feminine sakes, and masculine sakes, and these come about because of the natural ingredients, essentially, natural resources in both Kobe and Kyoto."