Expansion of Sake From China to Japan

Video Transcript

"Greetings, I'm Beua Timken, and I'm a master sake sommelier, and I'd like to speak to you a little bit about the history of sake. In life, we find that most things have either come from Africa or China, and sake is no exception. Forty five hundred years ago, one could trace back the origins of sake to a Yangateze river valley in China--tough to say, but it's actually the genesis of where they think sake originated. Now, rice, obviously, originated in China, and there was no natural rice formed in Japan up to about twenty five hundred years ago. So, rice was imported from mainland China in its current form--what we call we rice cultivation, where they're actually making wet rice fields, rice paddies, if you will. And that occurred about twenty five hundred years ago, in Japan. And as I like to say, Japan, is the epicenter, the ground zero for all sake production today. Now, rice in this context was used by farmers, obviously for consumption--they didn't know that it could turn into alcohol at the time. Now the history shows us that there's two different divergent thoughts of how sake as we know it came into existence. One is that the farmers left a batch of rice out and it kind of fermented naturally using airborne yeast, and another theory, another school, subscribes to the fact that yeast farmers would have celebrations where they'd actually take rice--their product--they would have somebody in the village, I'll tell you in a second, chew this rice. The enzymes in their mouth would break that long chain starch into glucose. They would spit that into a bucket, and then open air yeast would kind of propagate and ferment in the bucket. Kind of a chew and spit sake. Now the great thing is they wouldn't just let any Joe do it. They're having the village virgins do it. So it became a kind of sake known as kind of virginal sake. The chew and spit method. Now both methods would work, technically, but I like to prefer the virginal chewing and spit method, and it was used in celebrations, and the farmers had a real community aspect to it. And that's kind of the genesis of sake in Japan as we know it."