California's other wine region

Fall 2024 California Bountiful magazine

Making sake in the Golden State

Story by Caleb Hampton
Farm and mill photos by Fred Greaves
Brewery photos by Lori Eanes

Farmers in the Sacramento Valley have cultivated rice for more than a century. The climate and soil in the valley, which lies at the same latitude as Japan’s rice-growing region, are ideal for growing short- and medium-grain japonica rice, also called sticky rice.

For the past few decades, much of the Golden State’s crop has been exported to Asia and Europe, primarily for sushi. But lately, a small but growing share of California’s rice has been sold to producers of sake, a Japanese rice wine that dates to the third century.

The beverage has been among the fastest-growing alcohol categories in the U.S. in recent years, making a leap during the pandemic when people bought it to go with their takeout sushi. Several large Japanese-headquartered sake makers have brewing and distribution facilities in California. And earlier this year, Smithsonian Magazine called the emerging craft sake brewing scene in the U.S. “a movement.”

“The demand continues to grow,” says Erin O’Donnell, vice president of sales at Sun Valley Rice Co., which operates a rice mill in the Colusa County town of Arbuckle.

The farm

The Sacramento Valley grows around 500,000 acres of rice each year, planting in spring and harvesting in fall. In between, the crop is covered in slow-moving water about 5 inches deep, with the paddies turning a gleaming green in the summers.

Carissa Lee, a third-generation rice farmer in Colusa County, grows around 1,000 acres of rice and works as a procurer for Sun Valley, sourcing rice from nearly 200 family farms in the Sacramento Valley.

About two weeks before harvest, Lee says, she and other farmers pull the water off the crop to dry it out and mature the kernels before cutting the rice with a combine harvester. In the winter, many rice farmers flood their fields to provide wetland habitat for waterfowl migrating along the Pacific Flyway.

Most of the rice grown in California is a medium-grain variety called Calrose. Valley Select, a sister company of Sun Valley, also produces a sake rice variety called Yamada Nishiki. The company exclusively sourced a small amount of seed from Japan and spent years building its supply before being able to grow the special variety on a commercial scale.

“The king of sake rice,” as O’Donnell calls Yamada Nishiki, grows more than twice as high as Calrose, making it more difficult to machine harvest. “It’s very hard to grow,” O’Donnell says.

The mill

After rice is harvested, it is dried to a specific moisture level and hauled to warehouses across the Sacramento Valley before arriving at mills.

When Sun Valley receives a truckload of rice, employees take a sample for quality control, inspecting it for stones, bugs or other defects. The rice then goes through machines—some of them ordered from Japan and installed by a Japanese consultant to meet strict product requirements—which remove the outer bran layer to make white rice.

When Sun Valley opened in 2000, “it was really the beginning of the sushi boom,” O’Donnell says, with high demand for Calrose from restaurants in Asia, Europe and America.

In 2011, Valley Select took note of the demand for rice from sake makers and began milling rice for sake. Since then, the company’s sake milling operation has steadily grown.

The mill plays an important role in determining the quality of the beverage. That’s because sake is categorized by the level of polish on the rice kernels used to make it, with premium sakes tending to be made from kernels that have been whittled down to about half their original size.

“Sake rice is something special,” O’Donnell says. “In order to make high-quality sake, we mill the outer layers of the rice kernel so that we can get to those internal starches,” she says, indicating a tiny, rounded kernel. That starchy center is called the shinpaku, or “white heart.”

Milling a truckload of rice down to the pearly shinpaku preferred by sake makers takes the mill around three weeks, much longer than the standard milling done for sushi rice.

The brewery

Yoshihiro Sako, owner and head brewer of Den Sake Brewery in Oakland, has been making sake for eight years.

Aside from rice, sake has three ingredients: water, yeast and koji, a special mold produced only by a handful of suppliers in Japan.

When preparing a batch of sake, Sako steams the rice, spreads it out on a large table and mixes in the mold and yeast. “The koji basically breaks down the starch into sugar,” Sako says, which is then fermented by the yeast in a large tank, with water added, and converted into alcohol.

The mash stays in the temperature-controlled tank for up to a month before it is pressed, filtered and pasteurized. Most sake is then aged for around six months.

“If you do it right, the sake becomes aromatic, light, elegant and complex,” Sako says, with an alcohol volume usually between 13% and 18%. Sako always uses rice from a single origin, printing the farm’s name on the bottle, so that he can replicate the formula. Since opening Den Sake Brewery in 2017, he has twice been named a semifinalist for a prestigious James Beard Award.

The demand for sake rice in California is driven by large Japanese-headquartered companies with distributors in the U.S. But O’Donnell says craft breweries such as Den Sake also play an important role.

“The craft breweries are really elevating sake to the consumer,” she says. “When consumers see a sake craft brewery in their neighborhood, they might go in and try it for the first time.”

Caleb Hampton

A polished product

Premium sake is typically made from highly polished rice, the kernels whittled to their starchy core to get rid of the outer layers of fats, minerals and proteins that can create overbearing flavors and aromas.

Yoshihiro Sako, owner and head brewer of Den Sake Brewery in Oakland, learned the nuances of sake during years as a sake buyer and sommelier in San Francisco restaurants and as an apprentice at sake breweries in Japan.

But as a brewer, Sako has opted for more traditional methods that use a larger part of the rice kernel.

“In ancient times, there were no machines to mill, so they used minimally polished rice when they made sake,” he says. Mastering that method, he says, has helped him “create a modern flavor.”

Sako described Den Sake’s four sake labels as light and refreshing, all of them crafted to pair with California cuisines such as pasta with pesto or tomato sauce, pickles, green olives or grilled fish.

“The acidity cuts through everything and cleans the mouth,” Sako says.