Typhoon Me Once, Shame on You...

While my parents were visiting me in Kitakami, we spent part of our last day together scraping together a plan for when we met down south. While we were eating lunch in the Ofunato katsu restaurant, we saw Typhoon Halong was lingering off the Kyushu coast. We were a bit apprehensive, so we decided to meet in Kyoto on Saturday instead of Hakata on Sunday, wait out the worst of the storm and get to Sasebo together.

It meant I would have to forgo a paid night bus trip, but it also meant I wouldn't be enjoying a sleepless, white-knuckled midnight terror ride through a typhoon.

It also meant I could find a sake brewery for us to tour in Kyoto while we had the time. Kyoto is not only a beautiful city, but it is basically the cultural hub of Japan. A lot of art styles, craftsmanship, food, tea traditions started in Kyoto and then spread throughout the country. But more on Kyoto later, this is about the sake.

Sake, for those unfortunate enough to have never heard of it (truly, I'm sorry), is in short rice wine. Beer has hops. Wine is grape-tastic. Sake is silver gold. And Kyoto is a goldmine.

I grew up drinking Gekkeikan sake at New Year's with my parents, and I found the brewery is in Kyoto, a few minutes train ride south of the city. They offer admission to their brewery museum for about 300 yen, and with that you get to guide yourself through the museum, read English placards and drink some samples at the end. It's gotten great reviews by tourists, so I bookmarked it.

And then I found Yamamoto Honke. Just a block north, in the same Fushimi area, Yamamoto brewery has been in business since 1677! Fushimi lies over a pristine water table which has been storing water filtered through the perfect combination and depth of limestone and other rocks. Breweries draw this beautiful water out of the ground and use it for their sake brewing from washing the locally produced rice to feeding the process as required.

I was interested in Yamamoto Honke, so I sent an email to see if they were giving tours during the summer. Right away, let me tell you, the people of Yamamoto Honke are the sweetest, most accommodating, friendly people. Reina Yamamoto, wife to the current president's son (who will be the 12th generation owner some day!) emailed me. She said that since they were not brewing during the summer, the brewery wasn't really open.

But they were always willing to do tours when people asked! I was happily-guiltily surprised! I wasn't expecting to be offered a personal tour, but I was certainly excited. I thanked her right away and made sure it wasn't going to be an inconvenience for her. (There's protocol, people!) She assured me it wouldn't and she invited the three stooges for a Sunday morning tour and lunch at the on-site yakitori restaurant.

I'd been watching the weather nervously all week and was banking on the typhoon hitting the Kyoto area on Saturday and moving on by Sunday. My parents and I were planning on seeing a couple temples or museums (saw the craft museum and learned how kimono prints are done. Mind. Blown.) anyway, so the weather could do whatever it wanted as long as Sasebo was left unscathed.

Halong took that as a cue to take its own sweet time and stall out over the south eastern coast. Sunday morning, the beast was in full swing over Kyoto. Trains were being delayed and while we paid for shinkansen tickets out of town for after our tour, the clerk at the counter couldn't guarantee we'd be able to leave after 1:30. Ok, so a time limit. No big: Fushimimomoyama station is only about a 15 minute ride and the brewery is within walking distance. A little rain is no big. We had umbrellas. We could deal.

Well, we made it to the station, soggy, early and glaring at the horizontal rain flying down the street. Our umbrellas were bent on turning migratory and flipped inside out on occasion. Pros that we are, we just kept holding them into the wind until they snapped back in place. Yeah, we're pretty cool like that.

When we made it to the brewery, the gates were closed. We took shelter at the Gekkeikan's museum down the road, under the awning because the actual museum was closed. I called Reina and told her we were a bit early. She said she'd meet us at the brewery and let us inside. She hadn't expected the weather to be so bad, so they'd be a bit late.

Reina Yamamoto: Tour guide extraordinaire

No, relax, we got inside at about 10:20. Reina has perfect English and introduced us to her husband, the all-mighty future lord of the manor...brewery. After putting on our hair nets and booties, Reina first pointed out the "water floor" where we were standing. It was just a cement floor, but here she introduced us to the special, high quality spring water directly below the floor!

Upstairs, she began the tour. There are three major components to sake: the rice, the yeast and the water. An astounding amount of attention to detail goes into each. Well, for the water, it's just about picking the right source. Who wants tainted grey water in their sake cup? No, thanks.

As for the rice, Yamamoto Honke outsources to local farmers who not only grow the rice, but polish it, or remove a certain amount of the outer hull. Like a tootsie pop: you want that sweet, delicious, high quality nugget of deliciousness that's buried in the center.

Just add rice, sugar, yeast and a little hands on massage

That doesn't mean the outer part doesn't have it's own character. The taste and smoothness of the sake comes from how much of the rice has been polished and how much remains. This gets a bit confusing so bear with me:


The highest quality of sake is 35%. That's how much of the rice remains. Then there's 50%. The most common sake is 75%, where most of the original rice is still there, it's just been given a nice buff, really. That's what college students who want to feel cultured but don't like Manhattans drink. Or what you drink if you don't live in Japan where anything more than 50% is just an insult.

You can call her "Mom"

We met all the machines including the washers (note: the rice isn't just blasted or soaked in a tepid bath: it's spun in a metal bin while the spring water is sprayed gently at an angle, not right on the delicate rice) and even the "Mother." Anyone who's made the mistake of experimenting with sourdough starter knows what a Mother is, but it's basically a thick yeast culture that you keep adding your ingredients to and make your whole batch from.

Yamamoto Honke sake is also very hands on. There is usually only one sake master at each brewery, and, as Reina explained, because the things like analyzing, tasting and seasoning the sake can't be standardized, each brewery's sake master produces a unique product! His skills are only passed down to an apprentice who will eventually, maybe unwittingly, put his own techniques in and create a slightly different sake. It's a living, growing, evolving creature, the sake.

Sake is also a very sensitive little beast. Because the yeast are living little critters, they have to have the right conditions to ferment the rice and sugar (which, by the way, is added and mixed by hand at Yamamoto!), sake has to be brewed in the winter when the temperatures are more forgiving. Higher quality sake is also brewed in a small, wood-lined room where only the sake master's sterilized presence is allowed. Even walking in after eating nuts or yogurt would contaminate the sake brewed in there because the wood absorbs every single particle that comes to visit!

We'd let Reina know when we met outside that our shinkansen was at 1:15, so she assured us she'd get us on the train back in time.

Again, what service! People, find a Yamamoto Honke sake and order a case of the stuff. I cannot recommend them enough. I'm not speaking just out of gratitude for how we were treated, but from experience. Their sake is like drinking a unicorn's tears of bliss after it's flown over the Milky Way.

In all seriousness, their sake is the best I've ever tasted. Really, it's amazing and it breaks my heart to think that I'll probably never afford a bottle of their 35%, but I'm glad it lasted. Typhoon Halong could pound on the doors all it wanted, but my parents and I were sitting in the sake shop being served cup after cup of sake. We learned about pairing the different kinds and which ones are purely for drinking to enjoy the taste of the sake.

Reina also explained the special little cups. When you drink sake, you drink from a tiny cup. Sake is rich and very strong, so you only want to take a bit at a time. Sake graders use special cups with blue rings painted on the bottom so they can grade the clarity: apparently, a seasoned sake grader can detect different levels of yellowness in the sake!

At first, I was impressed with myself and said I could detect a little yellow...until Reina kindly pointed out the fluorescent lights over the table. More sake, please.

Reina also poured some very new sake: her husband's own creations! In Japan, there's some concern that younger people aren't embracing sake the way their parents did. So he created fruit flavored sake to spark a new interest. And it worked! One of the new blends won an award for best new sake! I believe it was the Asian lime...much sweeter than a key lime, with no tartness! There was also a lemony flavor and a plum, but the lime was amazing!

He also invented matcha sake! It's a very different taste, definitely heavy on the matcha, a tiny bit sweet and finishing with that beautiful, heady sake effect.

Oh, that's just where I keep my heirloom gold bars

The restaurant is a beautiful Japanese style. It figures because Reina told us the area where we were seated was formerly the founder's garden! The original stones, stone lantern and porch steps were still there! It just had tables and a roof. Behind our table up on the porch was a separate room. Reina told us this is where a family would store their valuables "like kimono, weapons and bars of gold."

To finish off our sake, we ordered some variety skewers (including chicken hearts and skins: yum!). When we were done, a waiter came and told us our taxi was here. They had actually ordered a taxi for us so we wouldn't have to walk to the station in the typhoon!

In high spirits, we careened through the streets back to the JR station. After the taxi pulled away, however, we learned the train would be delayed at least an hour...not until long after 1. I panicked. There were two other train stations a couple blocks away, but I hated the idea of making my parents dash through the storm. Worse, I hated the idea of my parents having bought our tickets and then losing that money.

Speaking of which, I'm about 99% sure I left my 5 day all day JR train pass at that dingy little station full of disagreeable conductors. But I didn't realize my mistake until we were well on our way to Sasebo. The confusion and frustration of contending with this stupid typhoon had me scatter-brained, and I think I just left it on the counter. I hope someone enjoyed their 5 non-consecutive days of unlimited 24 hour JR train riding.

The people at the station finally got through to me that the next train to Kyoto was leaving the nearest station in 7 minutes. Alright. It was about 12:20, we could do it. We could do it.

Useless umbrellas inside out under our arms, we sprinted through the rain. In any other situation, it would have been exhilarating, but I was freaking out about the time. I'm proud of my parents though: they boogied! We must have been an interesting sight, mad-dashing down the Fushimi streets in driving wind and rain, screaming encouraging "I'm still here! Don't stop!s" to each other.

We weren't able to fully calm down and breathe normally until we were finally on the shinkansen out of Kyoto. As our shoes leaked rain water, we laughed and reminisced about the sake to take our minds off the stitches in our sides.

While it wasn't the prettiest day I've had on vacation, it was certainly the most memorable. I'm already planning to go back in the fall when they start brewing the next batch. Maybe I'll buy some of that lime sake and tenderly gaze at my 35% one that got away.