Temples & Shrines Dedicated to Sake

Video Transcript

"I'm Beua Timken, I'm a master sake sommelier, I like to speak a little bit more about the history of sake. Thousand years ago, with the Imperial Court in Japan, put together the first, what we call brewery, where they really try to study and understand sake from a scientific point of view. For the next 150-200 years, as they're fermenting in the Imperial Court, some of the brewers said, "we want to go out and brew out in the countryside, if you will". So what they did, they approach shrines and temples and they went to the shrines and temples and they brought this new brewers, these guys who had excel in making a form of sake that we know today, and they went out to these, the shrines and they went to the temples it made a logical sense because the shrines own most of the fields, most of the countryside where you could grow rice. And the temples, they had the Buddhist Monks, they had monks, so they had manpower and resources and they also try to control water sources. So water, rice, people, those are basically the ingredients for making sake. So, the transformation went from Imperial Court out to the shrines and temples and they started brewing in different regions at the different shrines and temples, different styles of sake depending on what kind of rice they had locally, what kind of water they had locally and now we started noticing a little bit of a taerwa, a little bit of change in the form of sake as we know it today."