On the 8^th of this month, Haruo Matsuzaki – whom many of you know – gave the 88^th running of his “Nihonshu Shimin Kouza,” or “Sake Course for Ordinary Folks,” i.e. not professionals. Matsuzaki Sensei is a good friend, but also, perhaps my most significant teacher over these last 15 years. He does maybe two seminars a year now but back in the day, maybe 11 or 12 years ago, they were monthly. I still have all the notes…

 But with his trademark dry sense of humor, on this day he gave a sake rice seminar with sake from dozens of brewers that collectively represented 88 types of rice. Not all official sake rice, mind you, but 88 of ‘em. (Well, almost...) Eighty-eight rice types represented on the eighth day of the eighth month.

 Here, in a concise form, are some of the more important points of the seminar that preceded the tasting, and some discussions from brewers while tasting.

 New rice types are coming out all the time. Why?
Many reasons. One, to find a replacement for Yamada Nishiki. Yamada is expensive, and while great, it does not grow well everywhere. Brewers want something cheaper and closer but just as good.

 Also, local rice gives more of a local flavor, or at least a local tie and consistency, to sake. Using raw materials from another region is pretty much a chink in the armor of regionality. One Hokkaido brewer lamented how back in the 70s his company’s literature bragged that all their rice came from the main island of Japan, none from Hokkaido. Bragged. Now, their local Ginpu, is a major strain. But indeed they are coming out all the time, these new local rice types. I must see ten every autumn in the tasting season.

 What is so great about Yamada Nishiki anyway?
Sure, it is big, dissolves well, big shinpaku and low fat and protein. Its flavor is full and billowing and naturally a bit sweet. It rocks! But remember this: it also has massive predictability. It has been around since 1936, and of the 1400 remaining kura, over 1000 of them use at least some Yamada Nishiki.

What that means is tons of data, charts, figures, numbers, history and experience are floating around. People know how to handle the rice no matter what the harvest is like, or the water, or the desired style, as there are veritable reams of data. No matter what they might face or want to do, it has been done - and recorded - somewhere. This makes it much easier to brew great sake with it.

Note, on top of new rices, many (OK… some) new rice types are really just revived rices, ie. not grown for decades, perhaps since before the war, abandoned by farmers for easier-to-grow and sell table rice. Seeds remained in seed banks, but nobody was interested in using them until some brewer decided to try.

Why do they bother with this? Because the roots of the regions’ styles are often in those rice types, and if revived these tendencies and stylistic hints can sometimes be brought to the forefront.

What are the new rice types like?
Well, that depends. Matsuzaki Sensei explained something I had long thought to be true: when sake from new rice types come out, they are very often light, narrow in flavor profile, and tight. No breadth or depth to them. This is because the brewers have no data with which to work, so they are overly cautious when soaking and processing the rice. What they want to avoid at all costs is big, rough, sappy, sloppy, unrestrained flavor. They want to control it, to reign it in, to have it be subservient to the toji’s will. And too much moisture leads to faster dissolving and/or advanced mold growth (among a gazillion other things), which leads to those bumbling flavors.

So brewers are cautious, conservative, overly careful to not let the rice absorb too much moisture, or to dissolve too fast. And this mean flavors that are tighter than they need to be.

One great example of this is Dewasansan, that vaulted Yamagata rice. When it first came out about 15 years ago, it was quite tight. Not bad, but lacked breadth. Now, it rocks as the brewers up there have had a decade and a half to mess with it - and accrue data! 

If so many come out each year, where are they all now?
There are about 80 to 90 sake rice types out there now. Offical sake rice types, that is. There are many more that are good for brewing, and others that are still used for kakemai, et al. But the answer to the above question is some come and go. Some are abandoned, as they are too hard to grow or use in brewing. Sometimes, they just don’t work out.

How can one rice be “harder to grow” than another?
As one example of being hard to grow, consider the venerable Wataribune, used in the sake of the same name, and revived by the brewer, Yamauchi-san. He explained at the seminar that Wataribune, a revived rice, has very strong “datsu-ryuu-sei,” which is a fancy schmancy word that means the seeds fall off the stalks very easily. A good typhoon will blow your stalks clean - there will not be much left to harvest or brew with. The farmers joke that when they harvest with a combine so many grains fly off that they end up harvesting one crop and planting the next at the same time. All humor aside, you can see how each rice has its inherent hassles.

While the sake, of course, were all great and fun to taste, the content of the seminar was outstanding. To add to the fun, by coincidence, there were 88 people in attendance. Dig that! And at the end, we all asked about the 99^th seminar, to be held September 9 of some year in the future. It was hinted that the topic would be 99 yeasts. But who knows…

  (In a very Japanese way the seminar was beautified by one minor imperfection: one sake did not make it so the seminar with 88 different rice types had only 87.Gotta love it.)