Making a Simple Sake Rice Wine

Hey every one,

So I wanted to make a simple sake which is a rice wine ( it's technically a beer as rice is a grain)

unlike making beer there are no malted grains, instead a fungus called Koji turns the carbohydrates into sugar that the yeast can ferment.

The simplest way I found of getting the koji is in the form of yeast balls which contain both the koji and the yeast.

in my version I used long grain rice and the results were very promising

you will need:

2 yeast balls

1 kg of rice

a sterile bucket

something to cook the rice in.

This version ends up being dry which I like you can add more rice for a sweeter wine or back sweeten :)

So it has been a few days and everything is going well, but there won't be alot of wine so we are adding more rice

this will boost the alcohol :)

for this you will need to cook another 1 kg of rice

combine it with the bucket rice which is now dissolving away from the koji and the yeast it loving the sugars :)

I added 1 liter of water to aid the koji from being killed from the alcohol too quickly

now its time to wait for 35 days!

So i had expected this to be the easy part but it turns out it was not.

I spent time straining the milky rice wine to remove the excess rice, who wants lumps in their wine!

I ended up having to bottle up the sake in to bottles that i had to leave to separate in my fridge.

it's not a sake unless it's clear!

the process to get as much sake as you can takes about 4 weeks but you can drink it milky :)

now it's ready to drink!

the sake ended up clear and dry but very tasty considering it was made with long grain rice.

I will have to make this again but try a sweet version just for comparison.