Agriculture in the World

Civil Eats TV: Women Brewing Change at Sequoia Sake

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Craft sake making—each in Japan and overseas—remains to be a really male-dominated world; for now, there are solely three girls brewers within the U.S., and two of them occur to work at Sequoia Sake in San Francisco.

Noriko Kamei, her husband, Jake Myrick, and their daughter Olivia Kamei Myrick, 26, make sake collectively by hand within the first New World brewery to supply a second-generation inheritor. Kamei and Myrick share head brewer duties, and Kamei Myrick has already produced a number of sakes of her personal. As an alternative of feeling outnumbered that two-thirds of his enterprise is made up of girls, Myrick says, “I’m proud that each of the ladies in my life are making sake.”

Noriko Kamei, Jake Myrick, and Olivia Kamei Myrick at Sequioa Sake.

Noriko Kamei, Jake Myrick, and Olivia Kamei Myrick at Sequioa Sake.

In the course of the 10 years they lived in Japan as tech entrepreneurs, Myrick and Kamei found the distinctive attraction of nama, or unpasteurized sakes, which are typically brighter and more energizing tasting due to the residing microbes they comprise. Myrick was fascinated by sake brewers’ means to supply a variety of taste profiles from simply rice, water, and yeast. Once they returned to the U.S., they missed these recent sakes and determined to make sake brewing their subsequent start-up enterprise, launching Sequoia in 2014.

Sake is the more-than-2,000-year-old nationwide drink of Japan, an agricultural product with roots in mythology and the Japanese Shinto faith.

From their 2,500-square-foot brewery in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, the three make 12 completely different sorts of sake, most of them unpasteurized and all with natural rice. Kamei handles essentially the most tough facet of the work, which is making the koji, the fungus-inoculated steamed rice that’s the blueprint for the sake she envisions in her head. The koji spores are added to the yeast starter, or shubo, which touches off the conversion of starch to fermentable sugars.

To this base, they add three rounds of steamed rice, water, and yeast then they filter the sake, generally pasteurize it, and bottle it. Kamei loves the trial and error facet of her work, as she spends hours noticing and responding to minute adjustments within the koji. She compares the cautious consideration it takes to “watching a new child child.”

Kamei Myrick considers herself somebody who “performs greatest in jobs which might be extra bodily than psychological,” so sake making has been a superb match for her. From 2016 to 2018, she hung out in Fukushima Prefecture working as a kurabito, or sake brewery employee, at Miyaizumi Meijo Brewery and Akebono Brewery. As the primary feminine overseas apprentice, and a part of a household that runs a brewery within the U.S., she says that the pinnacle brewers “did educate me greater than they might to a few of their very own kurabito; they knew I used to be going again to Sequoia and was dedicated to creating sake.”

Kamei Myrick returned to California, the place—to encourage her curiosity—her dad gave her a 500-liter (132-gallon) fermentation tank to experiment with. Although she likes the flexibleness of working in a household enterprise, she can also be pursuing research in meals science at San Francisco Metropolis Faculty, and her future profession path remains to be taking form.

Sake’s Origins

Sake is the more-than-2,000-year-old nationwide drink of Japan, an agricultural product with roots in mythology and the Japanese Shinto faith. From in regards to the tenth Century, its brewing was managed by Buddhist monks; through the Edo Interval (1603-1868), manufacturing was put within the fingers of enormous landowners and service provider households that served and supplied for the ruling Tokugawa clan and its lords.

Hazy sake being poured into a glass

After reaching peak gross sales within the early Nineteen Seventies, home sake consumption has frequently dropped in Japan. Because of authorities restrictions on gross sales and the lengthy shutdown of eating places in Japan, breweries have additionally suffered through the pandemic. However lack of curiosity within the drink in its birthplace has been offset by rising world curiosity. There are greater than two dozen craft sake breweries within the U.S., and a half-dozen breweries in California alone.

New International Sake Makers Spur Innovation

Worldwide sake brewers, unfettered by generations of custom and societal expectations, are taking sake in new instructions. For Kamei Myrick, which means a distinctly San Francisco-leaning course. In 2020, she created her personal sake, Hazy Delight, which is a soft-textured and refreshing usu nigori, or calmly filtered sake.

She chosen its title as a result of its barely cloudy texture, but additionally to evoke—by way of the vibrating neon picture of a purple daisy on the label—the early hashish tradition of the Sixties Haight-Ashbury district. The nigori’s more-savory-than-usual high quality means it pairs effectively with goat cheese from the Marin Headlands or North Seashore pesto pizza. Hazy Delight proved so standard that it has develop into a part of the common lineup of Sequoia sakes.

Now, Kamei Myrick, who beloved the creating and advertising facet of that mission, is considering two extra bottles she will brew to type a trio of San Francisco-themed sakes. One can be a hiyaoroshi summer-aged sake that she hopes will categorical the cool San Francisco summer time by way of an added savory high quality. The opposite is a extra labor-intensive kimoto-style sake, which depends on native yeast and lactic acid.

Noriko Kamei sampling a Sequoia Sake.

Noriko Kamei sampling a Sequoia Sake.

She envisions its excessive acidity and sturdy taste as a superb expression of town’s personal fermentation tradition, which ranges from sourdough bread to third-wave espresso. “I’m an enormous fan of fermentation,” says Kamei Myrick. “It’s actually stunning to stay and work with microorganisms to create one thing like sake that brings folks collectively.”

Sake Rice Rising in California, Questions of Sustainability

As curiosity in sake making and ingesting within the U.S. has grown, so has the necessity to supply sakamai, or sake rice. Myrick and Kamei work with fifth-generation Sacramento Valley natural rice farmer Michael Van Dyke, who grows 5 acres of Calrose M105—a hybrid bred each for its early maturing high quality and excessive secure milling fee—for them. Its shorter rising season requires much less water, an vital high quality in a state now struggling its third 12 months of a historic drought.

Calrose is a desk rice reasonably than a sakamai, one in every of 115 or so varieties grown particularly for sake making. This isn’t essentially a destructive. Even in Japan, extra craft brewers are that includes sakes brewed with inexpensive desk rice as advances in brewing expertise and know-how have helped offset variations between the 2 forms of rice.



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