Akaisake: The Rare Red Sake

[Taylor-MadeAK]

At Percival's request, here is a Brewday thread about making sake. A full-blown Taylor-MadeAK guide will be written about this when/if I am satisfied with the results of this little experiment, but for now I'll keep this thread going as a sort of ongoing log of how this first try is progressing, kept in addition to my written log.

For those of you who don't know about this style of sake, you can read about it here. This is a very difficult style of sake to find outside of Japan, however, so good luck on finding a commercial sample to taste prior to making it yourself. I certainly can't find a bottle of it here in Anchorage, AK. :cry:

Okay, there really isn't much to be said at this point, but I'll start with the recipe:

10.00 lbs Short Grain Rice
04.75 cup Koji (normal aspergillus oryzae stuff)
01.25 cup Red Koji, aka "Red Yeast Rice" (monascus purpureus, called beni-koji in Japan)
02.00 gal Water (chlorine and iron free)
00.75 tsp Yeast nutrient
01.00 pn Epsom salt
01.25 tsp Morton salt substitute
01.00 ea White Labs WLP705 Sake yeast (Japanese #7 strain)

This is, of course, my usual sake recipe and I'll be following my usual method. The catch is I've replaced 20% of the koji with red beni-koji, which is where the red color that akaisake is named for comes from. Click the link if you want to read up on the stuff, evidently there are some interesting health benefits that caused the FDA to ban the sale of this substance in the United States. If you live in a city with a strong Chinese presence (I'm looking at you, California!), you might be able to find some at a Chinese medicine shop. For my part, I had to ask a friend who lives in Singapore to send me some.

If this works out, then I'll order more to possibly do some experiments on propagating the monascus pupureus organism.

So, here I am at the beginning of the batch. To make measuring easier, I just mixed the beni-koji in with my just finished batch of kome-koji (you can learn how to make that here:



Half a cup of this koji mixture was added to my sanitized fermenter along with 2.5 cups of water with the yeast nutrient and epsom salt mixed in. I'd love to show you a picture of that, but my camera just wouldn't take a clear picture of it. This mixture, the beginning step of moto was left to stand overnight. The next day, 1.5 cups of rice were rinsed, soaked, steamed, and then added to the fermenter:



This is allowed to stand at room temperature (~72ºF) for two days, during which time the rice will absorb all of the enzyme-rich liquid that it was added to, then let go of it again as the a-amylase enzymes act to saccharify the amylose in the rice. After 48 hours there is still some starch in there, but there is now a whole lot of sugar. Perfect for a yeast starter!

Time to add the yeast:



Just like any other fermentation, there's a lag phase associated with this step. The moto rests in the icebox overnight to encourage any lactobacillus to go dormant, then it comes back out the next day and allowed to warm up to ambient room temperature again. The moto gets stirred twice a day for 3 days, then once a day for 3 more days. By the second day, we're beginning to see signs of fermentation as the yeast take hold:



And now you are current with where I am on this batch. :thumb:

 

[Wez]

Great thread - will watch with interest :thumb:

 

[A T]

It sure is nice to see something different in the brewday thread, i'm sure many of us will follow this one with great interest :thumb:

 

[percival]

cool thread, cheers Taylor.

i hope you manage to encourage one of us to make some too. there are some large diverse communities around the UK, mostly in big cities, who i guess would have (or be able to get) koji. Probably the hardest ingredient to find by far.

i hope it works out at least as good as you are hoping for!

 

[Taylor-MadeAK]

Well, it's been a couple of weeks, so I'd say it's time for an update.

Two weeks after starting the moto, it's time to build up the moromi - starting with hatsuzoe and the included 2-hour interval stirring that my daughter likes to help with (pictures of me hand-mixing the moromi courtesy of my wife):




Two days later, nakazoe and tomezoe look much the same but with the volume doubling each time:




After all of the rice, water, and koji have been added and thoroughly mixed in, the whole moromi rests for 12 hours at 70ºF before moving to the fridge and cooling down to 50ºF for the long three week fermentation.

 

[percival]

nice one Taylor, especially nice to see a pic or two of the world's future best sake brewer taking some early steps

i love how something that looks so disgusting when fermenting turns out looking (and tasting!) wonderful.

 

[Taylor-MadeAK]

Lol this three-year-old is a future something, that's for sure! Rachel shares her daddy's wide range of interests - from baby dolls to zymurgy, this kid covers everything.

I'll give you an example. It gets dark real early this time of year in this part of the world, and by "early" I mean the sun is below the horizon by 16:30. This past week a whole bunch of elements lined up just right: early nightfall, clear skies, early moonrise, and Venus happens to be really close to us in her orbit. So, we're out doing a bit of errand-running last Thursday evening at about 17:00, when Rachel says "Hey, I see a star!" from the back seat. It wasn't yet dark enough to see any stars, so when we got out of the car I asked her to point out which star she's talking about.

So, she points, and I look where she's pointing - just about due south. Sure enough, there's a very bright star just to the lower-right of the half moon. No other stars were visible because it was still dusk, but this sucker was so bright that at first glance you'd swear it was an airplane or something, but it wasn't moving like one. Upon closer inspection, I could see that it had a phase (with the naked eye, no less).

Well, immediately I realized that we were looking at Venus and explained that to her - how Venus is Terra's sister planet, etc. So now Rachel has added another planet to her understanding of the night sky (we were looking at Mars on its closest approach during this time last year), and every night this week has insisted on dragging me outside - in spite of the negative double digit temperatures! - to look at it and the moon because both are visible from our front porch:



You will almost certainly need to click that thumbnail to see it, my digital camera isn't so hot for astrophotography.

Well, there we have it: from astronomy to zymurgy, my daughter and I cover the whole range of interests. Meanwhile, my wife thinks we're both daft for dragging the telescope outside when it's -29ºC out there. :lol:

 

[BrewStew]

Woah! nice shot.

it's a shame it's so cloudy here as i'd like to be able to see it through some binoculars.

 

[percival]

:thumb:

i like chatty threads, nice read thanks Taylor.
Do you think your daughter is set on the path of science? i like her size range of interests from yeast to planets!

do you take her out looking for shooting stars? they are suprisingly common. On a clear night if you wrap up warm lie down looking at the sky your field of view will slowly grow. While its doing so its easy to switch into 'the wonder of universe mode' and pass some time. Over the course of the night you would be unlucky not to spot a few. A couple of hours every now and then should yield results. It was always one of the things i enjoyed about camping in remote spots away from our human light pollution. I don't get the same buzz off seeing a satellite, but some are more thrilled by this.

do you get to see the northern lights where you are? i lived in the NE of england for a while and it got dark at a similar time in midwinter (sunset at 15:55 there tonight). i never saw the northern lights from there tho.

 

[Taylor-MadeAK]

It's much too cold here to look for shooting stars in the way that you describe, though we've seen a few while outside looking at Luna or Venus. Stargazing of any kind in my immediate area is very difficult because of light pollution, which is counterintuitively worse in the winter because of all the snow reflecting the street lights back up into the sky. Anchorage also tends to be very cloudy because we sit in a bowl that very effectively funnels weather in over the city, which makes seeing aurora pretty difficult. We do get out to Eagle River occasionally, however, and the light pollution and clouds are much less dense out there - much better for stargazing nerds like me. =)

Sol is just coming out of the minimal activity portion of its cycle, so the aurora haven't been very active the past couple years. I honestly don't expect to see any from Anchorage for a year or two.

 

[Taylor-MadeAK]

Pressing day! This is the second time using my "new" press for pressing sake. In my quest to find pressing bags that work better than the ones I already had (the super-fine one that let liquid through only very slowly and the coarse one that let too much kasu through), I stopped by the hardware store and had a look at their paint straining bags. Two "five gallon" paint straining bags cost me about $4 and turned out to have a mesh that was just about right smack in between the two types sold by my LHBS, which meant they would probably be about perfect for the job. The down side is the material they're made from is lighter than what's used for actual pressing bags, so I wasn't sure how they would hold up to the pressure generated by a press.

The initial results were pretty positive, the paint straining bag let plenty of liquid through rather quickly while holding back the more solid material of the kasu. I still need to work on my pressing technique, but the mortal blow to this pressing session came when the pressure generated by the final hard pressing popped a quarter inch hole in the material of the pressing bag - sending moromi jetting in to my face and across the table. :shock: It wasn't much of a mess, and I had already transferred and pressed all of the moromi before it happened. When I inspected the lees after taking the press apart, I found that the very middle was still pretty wet with perhaps a cup of sake that wasn't recovered. No big deal, I just moved the kasu to my usual freezer containers (for later use in making pickles!) and discarded the busted bag. The good news is it was a two-pack of bags, so it's not like I have to buy a new one next time. :mrgreen:

In the end I have just over 2.5 gallons of cloudy akaisake in secondary with a FG of 0.997. It'll be left alone for the next two weeks before undergoing the racking/fining/pasteurizing step.

Here are the pics of today's pressing:

 

[percival]

this is a great thread, i'm so glad you made it. It looks like a lot of fun to make

my only criticism .... where is the piccie of you with moromi on your face :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[jamesb]

my only criticism .... where is the piccie of you with moromi on your face :lol: :lol: :lol:

Is that anything like *******?

DO NOT LOOK THAT UP ON THE INTERNET AT WORK

 

[BrewStew]

Is that anything like *******?

DO NOT LOOK THAT UP ON THE INTERNET AT WORK

putting that in small print was cruel :lol:

 

[jamesb]

Is that anything like *******?

DO NOT LOOK THAT UP ON THE INTERNET AT WORK

putting that in small print was cruel :lol:

Ah, but it's always the small print that gets you.

 

[BrewStew]

:lol: too true!

 

[Taylor-MadeAK]

:rofl: Truthfully, there wasn't that much of it on my face, just a couple flecks. My wife was too busy cleaning it off of the table to take any pictures of me, though.

 

[percival]

you might like this taylor .... seeing as we are in a laughing at others mode

http://www.killsometime.com/Video/video.asp?ID=462

its about wasabi .... and what you definately shouldn't do with it .... makes me laugh over and over

 

[Taylor-MadeAK]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!! Oh, my sides!

I can't help but wonder: what made that guy think doing that was a good idea? ROFL!

 

[percival]

soooo glad you liked that one, pass it on ... i'm sure you'll know plenty of folks who'll love it