Is there radiation in Japanese sake?

The purity of rice is very important to Japanese consumers

Sake breweries in Japan don't want to talk about radiation, but American drinkers do. A Colorado sommelier told me it was the first question people asked when seeing a sake on the wine pairing list: Is this safe?

I visited 10 breweries and Nanbu Bijin owner Kosuke Kuji was one of the few to address the issue, but he's also a professor at Tokyo Agricultural University.

Kuji buys most of his rice from a local co-op in Iwate prefecture. The location is important: Iwate prefecture is northeast of Fukushima.

Wind flows west to east over Japan, so the great majority of breweries, more than 90%, can shrug off the radiation question. We're more likely to have radioactive particles from Fukushima in California than they are in Kyoto or Fukui or even nearby -- but due west -- Niigata. Sake brewers assume we're smart enough to read a map, but of course we aren't. I asked this question in Yamaguchi prefecture, at the far southwestern end of the main island of Japan, and the brewer laughed at me.

To watch sake being made, good socks are important

Dassai's production manager tries to talk vice-president Kazuhiro Sakurai, right, out of letting me touch the rice

If you want to visit a Japanese sake brewery, be sure to wear attractive socks. You might be able to prevent a hanging.

At every brewery I visited last week, I switched from shoes to slippers to stocking feet to slippers to other slippers. Part of this is culture: the Japanese obsession with the uncleanness of the bottoms of shoes, which are "soto" -- outside -- as opposed to "uchi," inside.

But there's an extra layer of hygiene that you don't see at wineries, where I can wear holey, mismatched socks and nobody will ever know.

Visitors to a sake brewery must wear lab coats and hair nets and wash our hands first with soap and then with alcohol. I thought the precautions were extreme until I asked about the consequences of not following them.

In sake, money brings the elegance of simplicity

Cold winters in Niigata allow long fermentation that leads to a clean, pure sake

In most of the wine and spirits world, money tastes like power. Sake is different: the taste of money, in sake, is often clean and elegant.

The Japanese aesthetic is responsible, and I mean this mostly about food, but not exclusively. Expensive works of Japanese art traditionally are breathtakingly simple. Think about the Zen rock gardens of Kyoto: how we're supposed to feel from looking at three rocks in a field of sand.

Japanese food is the same way. If you really want to drop serious coin on sushi in Tokyo, you don't get 49er rolls -- you get a single piece of pristine fish on a log of vinegared rice. You are to appreciate the cut, the delicacy. The taste should be clean, not complex: simple.

Naturally, the right sake for that kind of food is also clean, simple, pristine. But it's anathema to the wine and spirits world. Expensive spirits generally taste of longer time in oak. And from a sake point of view, I can divide the world's wineries by their goals: power, or complexity.

I can't think of a high-end winery that pursues the goal some Japanese breweries are after, particularly in Niigata.

Nanbu Bijin All Koji sake: agriculture professor makes fascinating new style

Professor Kosuke Kuji coddles his spore-laden rice

Sake isn't like wine because rice isn't like grapes. If you pick ripe grapes into a bucket and leave them alone, they will ferment on their own because they're full of sugar. If you pick rice into a bucket and leave it alone, weeks later you'll still have a bucket of rice.

To make sake, you have to convert the starches in the rice into sugar. Until about 700 AD, Japanese did this by chewing on it and spitting into a pot; they called it "kuchikami" (mouth chew) sake. Then traders brought a specialized mold called "koji" from China, transforming the beverage into the earliest version of something we might recognized today.

With apologies to shiitake mushrooms, koji is the most important fungus in Japan. Different strains of koji produce soy sauce, miso, sake and shochu (liquor).

For sake, brewers carefully prepare their rice for the precious yellow koji spores by polishing it to its core, soaking it and drying it, so it becomes crumbly and permeable. Then they take it into a warm, fungus-friendly room.

Nanbu Bijin owner Kosuke Kuji jokes that shochu makers toss koji spores on their rice like a man throwing bread to feed pigeons. 

Sake with non-Japanese food

Yes, this is great with sake -- but so are mashed potatoes

Many Californians first encounter good sake at high-end, non-Japanese restaurants. The French Laundry has used sake on its pairing menu for years.

Sake in these restaurants usually comes early in the meal with a raw fish course. But sake works with the entire menu, and especially well with dishes that are earthy, mushroomy or creamy.

I went to an event for sommeliers in San Francisco intended to prove that. Fifth Floor chef David Barzigan made a five-course menu, and two master sommeliers, David Glancy and Emily Wines, chose one sake for each course in a sake-pairing challenge.

For sommeliers, this is fun. For the average drinker, I'm not so sure. On an airplane last week I watched "Bernie," a true story about a Texas man who murdered his elderly female companion. The prosecutor, trying to show the jury that Bernie was a man of first-class tastes and desires, says, "I'll bet you know the right wine to go with fish." Bernie says, "I don't know, white wine, I guess." The jury sentences him to 50 years.

Sake time at The Gray Report

Karaoke box, Tokyo, 2 a.m.

Welcome to sake fortnight at The Gray Report! See you next month.

Seriously, I'm in Japan and I'm going to blog about sake for the next two weeks. I'm a huge fan of sake, one of the most diverse and interesting drinks in the world. The range of flavors that brewers can coax from rice is amazing.

"When I pour people the first good sake they've ever had, they say, 'Wow! Sake is really great!' They love it," says Yoshihiro Sako, sake specialist at Izakaya Yuzuki in San Francisco.

In the US, sake is hot (not always literally). Sake sales rose 80% in the US last year, albeit from a small base, according to wine industry analyst Jon Fredrikson.

But that heat hasn't spread far from the coasts. K&L Wine Merchants ships sake to 18 states, but sake buyer Melissa Lavrinc Smith says K&L rarely gets sake orders from outside California.

Blogging about sake usually comes at some personal cost. I get about 1/4 the page views, on average, when I blog about sake as when I do about wine. So blogging about sake for two weeks is a good way to lose as many readers as possible.

But what the hell, it's not all about page views. We're in the golden age of sake, and I'd love to see people drink more.

Is a Budweiser/Corona merger really bad for America?

Beer prices already have been rising, before the proposed merger

Much more than wine or spirits, the US beer industry is controlled by a few big brands. Three companies currently control 75% of the market.

That could shrink to two companies if Anheuser Busch InBev's $20 billion purchase of Grupo Modelo is allowed to happen. The US Justice Department filed suit yesterday to try to prevent the purchase for antitrust reasons.

It's interesting that the Justice Department is worried about the price of Bud Light. The Justice Department released a statement saying "competition (between the beer giants) has resulted in lower prices and product innovations that have benefited consumers across the country."

Is that true? Maybe the lower-priced part. Although looking at the chart above, maybe not.