Japan's signature drink has been brewed for around as long as hanami celebrations have existed, with historians dating its invention to the Nara period (710-794), although booze of various forms has been drunk on the island from at least the third century. While a degree of snobbery endures, there's logic behind the idea that you heat cheap sake and chill the expensive stuff. "If you heat fruity, light, floral sake, all you're going to get is alcohol fumes," says Cheong-Thong. Sakes with more body, or bottles which have been open a while, work well warmed to around 50 degrees, as the heat smooths out some of the rougher notes. "The flavours will still be in the sake, although the alcohol hits you first. Also, it's a very good way to liven up slightly stale sake." How we test sake Akashi-Tai Tokubestu Junmai is quite pleasant chilled. It has an elegant but subtle aroma with notes of apple, elderflower and rice. The sake is quite acidic and dry with a simple taste, creamy texture and short but pleasant finish. I tried it chilled first and the low temperature does not do justice to Kanpai Tsuki. The fun starts at room temperature as the sake opens up. So you can smell sweet apple and pear with honey notes and some herbs and a bit of chestnut. It’s a full-bodied sake, slightly fizzy with a creamy texture notable acidity and spiciness from the higher alcohol content. It has a bitter but pleasant finish. I have featured Akashi-Tai sake before as I quite like it. However, it’s the first time I tried Akashi-Tai Tokubetsu Junmai. I asked Miho san, who represents the brewery here, what her favourite temperature for drinking this sake. “Make it really hot!” she replied. So I started with 50C and wasn’t disappointed.

That flavour is dictated by each brewery's toji – the sake master. Unlike wine, where taste is as much about the soil as the choice of grapes and which kind of wood it's aged in, sake is purely about ingredients and technique, rather than terroir. However, when you start to warm it up, the sake opens up and the acidity becomes milder but doesn’t disappear completely. Actually, it was one of the main things I liked about Akashi-Tai Tokubetsu JUnami: its ability to hold acidity even at a high temperature. The warmer sake gets, the more sweetness comes out and the more mouthful it becomes. I liked it best at 50C as Miho san recommended. Really, it's the wrong name: the Japanese character for 'sake' just means 'alcohol', "but at some point it got bastardised," says Cheong-Tong. "It should really be called 'nihonshu': 'nihon' meaning Japan, 'shu' is the alcohol of Japan." Akashi-Tai Honjozo Sake, is a medium-bodied sake with hints of citrus and straw, this is the drink the brew masters reach for at the end of a working day Surely, Hakusturu Excellent Junmai has it in the name. The sake is really excellent, affordable and versatile. You can enjoy it at any temperature. Chilled, it has a light aroma of grapefruit, toasted rice and green apple. When you drink Hakusturu Excellent Junmai straight out of the fridge, the sake is off-dry with pleasant acidity and light vanilla and Bromley apple notes. The sake is medium-bodied, with a silky texture and a long nice finish.However, when you start warming the sake up, it becomes much more enjoyable. The acidity melts down with the sweetness making the taste more mellow and gentle. The spiciness from alcohol becomes more prominent but without a strong alcohol aftertaste. Polishing is perhaps the key step in defining what kind of sake gets made. It involves stripping away each rice grain's outer husk to reduce down the amount of protein and fat available for fermentation and thus shorten the brewing process. For the brewery today, this means treating rice with respect. It means meticulous attention to detail and never cutting corners. It means sometimes going to extreme lengths, for instance making sake not only with the finest Hyogo-grown Yamada Nishiki rice, but also brewing with the

Helpful as these categories are, they offer only a vague sense of the breadth and variety available, even within each category. The only way to really find out what you like is to taste broadly and see what lights up your palette.

Drive & Curiosity

Akashi-Tai is named after its home city, where the brewery started life in 1856 and continues to this day. Akashi city is a coastal fishing town in Hyogo Prefecture, which is known as the traditional sake brewing capital of Japan. Mr Yonezawa explains the brewery’s philosophy this way: “My mission is to make sake that can reveal the character of Hyogo’s water, rice and yeasts, among the finest in Japan, and really let them shine.” Tamagawa Tokubetsu Junmai is a savoury full-bodied sake with a deep taste and silky texture. For me, it tasted sweeter chilled or at room temperature than hot. The sweetness seems to dissolve as you warm the sake up. As many junmai sake, Tamagawa is not particularly aromatic sporting some rice notes and a bit of earthiness. The different temperatures provide a changing array of flavours for the palate to appreciate. Warm sake is rather unusual in the world of alcoholic beverages, but it has a long history. Brewing superior sake by hand requires all five senses to perfect with the natural processes of fermentation and flavour development.

When you try Tedorigawa Yamahai Junmai chilled, you taste its high acidity straight away. It has a nice creamy texture and is quite a mouthful feel with a long finish with a vanilla aftertaste. You can notice prunes and apple crumble flavours and the taste in general quite deep. Given the region’s reputation for producing sake, it’s no surprise that the brewery is dedicated to deep-rooted brewing traditions and heritage. Akashi-Tai is true artisan sake, handmade in small batches by the toji (or master brewer) Kimio Yonezawa and his close team of trusted craftsmen. But to Akashi-Tai, respecting tradition also means keeping it alive, in an unending quest to challenge and improve throughout every step of the sake-making process. The Tedorigawa brewery makes a wide range of excellent sake from classy Ika na Onna to sweet and clean Kinka and mellow Yamahai Junmai Daiginjo. You can enjoy all of them at various temperatures. But Tedorigawa Yamahai Junmai was probably specifically made to drink warm.Akashi-Tai Honjozo sake is made to be slightly lighter in style than their other types of sake, using high quality rice and a small amount of brewers alcohol to create a crisp, dry and easy to drink sake. While people outside Japan are just catching on to the great potential of sake and food matching, it’s a known fact in sake’s homeland that it can all but transform a meal. What’s more, it goes with a variety of dishes beyond what we might think of as its classic partner, sushi. As the Japanese saying goes, “sake and food never fight”. Akashi aren’t traditional or artisan in a manner that would hinder them, however, and they have embraced modern innovations such as temperature controlled fermentation in recent years. The more recent progressive outlook led Akashi to individual discoveries and ideas, the prime example probably being the ‘Genmai Aged Sake’; Japan’s first ever brown rice sake. Bottled and released in 2005 following its inception in 2002, ‘Genmai Aged Sake’ represents a truly novel concept, using unpolished (brown) rice that’s aged for a unusually long time. Akashi Tai Junmai Ginjo Sparkling Sake is made using only locally grown rice from the Hyogo Prefecture. Ginjo is a premium type of Sake made with rice that has to have at least 40% of the outside of the rice grains (the bran) polished away. Junmai means no distillers alcohol is added which it can be in other Sakes e.g. Honjozo Sake. The Sake undergoes a careful, low temperature fermentation and it is then undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle with some more koji (the fungus used in fermentation process) to produce the fizz. The sake is carefully fermented at low temperature and it is allowed to undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle with some more koji (the fungus used in fermentation process).