Sake is brewed like beer, and once funded Japan more than land did
Sake is brewed more like beer than wine, but in a single stage: rice starch turns to sugar and sugar to alcohol at the same time. Undiluted, it reaches 18–20% alcohol. By 1899 Japan's liquor tax was bringing in a bigger share of national revenue than the tax on land.
Rice fermentation reached Japan from China around 500 BCE, and a 3rd-century Chinese chronicle already describes Japanese people drinking and dancing. Alcohol appears several times in the Kojiki, compiled in 712, and true sake, made from rice, water and the mould kōji, probably took shape in the Nara period (710–794). In the Heian period it served religious rites, court festivals and drinking games. The government long held a brewing monopoly, but from the 10th century temples and shrines became the main producers for some 500 years.
Before the 1440s the temple Shōryaku-ji devised methods that still underpin brewing, which is why it is called the birthplace of clear seishu. Late in the Muromachi period a tub holding 10 koku, about 1,800 litres, replaced the small jars brewers once lined up by the hundred. In the Genroku era of the Edo period brewers began adding a little distilled shōchū to the mash for aroma and keeping quality, the ancestor of modern alcohol addition. As Edo boomed in the early 1600s, brewers moved to the Nada-Gogō coast in Hyōgo, drawn by good water, suitable weather and easy shipping; it remains the largest producing area.
Rice was not always plentiful. Poor harvests led the Tokugawa shogunate to restrict brewing 61 times, and in 1673 a shortage prompted a ban on everything except winter brewing. In the Meiji era breeders produced dedicated sake rice: Omachi in 1866 and, in 1923, Yamada Nishiki, later nicknamed the king of sake rice.
The state also leaned on sake for money. Liquor tax made up 12.3% of national tax revenue in 1878 and 38.8% in 1899, overtaking land, and that year home brewing was banned because homemade sake escaped tax. During World War II, rice shortages pushed brewers to stretch small amounts of mash with large doses of distilled alcohol and glucose, raising yields as much as fourfold.
Source: Sake
