Sake tasting 🍶

[dorchadas]

Last night, worldbshiny and I went to a sake tasting event at Slurping Turtle. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, since the event just read:

Sip on a variety of rare and hard to find Sakes at this unique event! Join us on Tuesday, April 16th, 2019 from 6pm-9pm for a Sake Social, including 10+ Sakes, Japanese whisky & passed appetizers. Industry experts will guide your tasting experience and provide details about all things sake!

Guide our tasting experience? "Passed" appetizers? Well, sake is the best alcohol on the planet, so I asked some people and of them worldbshiny was free, so we went.

It turned out to be much more informal than I was expecting. Slurping Turtle had put out takoyaki, kara-age, cucumber rolls, edamame, and gyōza and then the sakes were mostly in plastic tubs filled with ice. There were people on both sides of the central table, and the host told us to go join the line, so we did.

Sadly, I didn't get a picture of the first group of sakes, or of the whiskeys--though the Akashi Ume Whisky was fantastic--but I got pictures of the other batches and I remember some of the explanations we got from the experts there.

The best of these was the 南部美人 nanbu bijin ume rosé sake, to the right of the canned sake. I love umeshu, but a lot of it is artificially and sickly sweet due to having sugar added to it. The best umeshu I've ever had was when one of our neighbors brought up a bag of vegetables from her garden and a can of homemade umeshu. It looked like it was rotten plums floating in unpleasantly-brown water, but it tasted amazing. This is probably the second-best umeshu I've ever had.

The canned sake was also surprisingly good, and now that I can look up the kanji I can see why. It's 菊水 kikusui ("chrysanthemum water"), and everything I've tried from them is good. The white bottle with the mostly-obscured label that says 八海山 hakkaisan was aged in snow--they take the sake and put it in an icehouse with a ton of snow, and leave it there for three years (which is apparently much longer than most sakes, which are aged 3-6 months).

The 天吹 amabuki on the right was a strawberry sake that actually did have a strawberry aftertaste, which I was amazed at. Strawberries don't have a strong flavor, but neither does a lot of sake, so I guess they mixed together well.

We started with the きりんざん kirinzan in the blue bottle on the right, which was extremely smooth (and costs $80 a bottle, looking it up!). It looked and almost tasted like melted glacier water, except for the alcohol.

The sake expert (a woman Extremely rare in Japan for all the reasons you'd think, but hopefully more common in America) told us about sake rice as she poured us a sample of the 獺祭 dassai. Table rice for eating has the nutrients, fats, starches, and so on mostly evenly distributed throughout the grain. Rice bred for sake has all the starch concentrated in the center, and then the grains are milled to remove everything but the starch. That's what 吟醸 (ginjō, "meticulous brewing") and 大吟醸 (daiginjō, "extremely meticulous brewing") mean. The kirinzan was brewed from the most popular sake-brewing rice in Japan and the dassai was brewed from the second-most popular.

The 天と地 ama to chi ("heaven and earth") was called that because it was made of both of those rice varieties mixed together. It was good, with a bit of a sharp aftertaste. More body to it than the kirinzan had.

I don't remember anything about the 越後の蔵秘伝 echigo no kurahiden in the center.

This one I remember the least about--probably because it was the last of four tubs full of sake, even though we had taken a break for food and chatting between tubs three and four--but I know I can recommend the 水芭蕉 mizubasho on the far right and the くろさわ kurosawa nigorizake on the far left, because I've bought both of them in Chicago before! I brought a bottle of the kurosawa to a dinner that lisekatevans invited me to and it was delicious, sweet and almost milky. Maybe not great to drink with food, but a great sipping drink.

And unfortunately, none of the other bottles here stand out in my memory.


We were there until just after nine when the event ended, much to our surprise. worldbshiny said she had expected to be there until maybe 7:30, but the atmosphere turned into more of a party as the night went on. The experts brought out a drinking game with three kabuki masks of various sizes and a dreidel (their words) which had mask pictures on the sides, and players would drink from the mask whose picture came up. I said I was Jewish and had lived in Japan, and then they said that because of that I had to play, so I did. I spun the dreidel off the table and they told me that was a multiplier, so when the largest mask came up on the second spin, I drank twice from it.

Waking up this morning was a bit rough, though I'm fine now as I write this.

As worldbshiny were standing near the game, a couple (Edit: cillic and heather.eisele) came up to talk to us. cillic took in my all-black clothing and my long hair and asked me what I did, as he opined that I did not seem like someone from the corporate world. I told him I worked for the AMA, and he said he also worked for a nonprofit, and we chatted for a while. I do not remember about what, but I do remember having a nice time, and we exchanged Twitter usernames and Facebook invites all around. And then worldbshiny and I walked to the red line, both made it home safe, and collapsed into bed.

Best $30 I've spent in a long time! One of the experts said that given the value of the sake they were serving, it should have cost $150 a ticket, but even at that low price there didn't seem to be that many people there. worldbshiny suggested that maybe they were expecting a bigger turnout, and maybe they were. But it meant the event was pretty cozy and there wasn't any rushing, so I'm satisfied even if Slurping Turtle wasn't!