Sunflower Club Monthly Archives
Japan’s record heatwaves are flipping the script on a century of rice breeding for cold tolerance. From the 1600s to as late as the 1950s, a majority of Tohoku and Hokkaido residents were in a state of extreme poverty, growing more desperate in years of bad weather and volcanic activity. The majority of Japan’s great famines occurred in Tohoku, which was only barely warm enough to ripen rice in a good year. So when a few lucky (and talented) farmers in Yamagata identified and bred the most cold-tolerant, and palatable, rice variety in history, it was only a few decades before Tohoku's circumstances turned around. With this club, we taste through the relatively recent history of Kamenoo and its progeny, and learn a bit about the difficult history of northern rice in Japan.
Continue reading
Terada Honke, maker of Gonin Musume, is an unusual brewery. Their sake is made with organic rice, entirely ambient microorganisms, and ancient methods. Their sake is very much alive, and ages rapidly (and dramatically). For the first time ever, Oregon has received two different Gonin Musume products and with my personal cellar stash of back vintages, we have a unique opportunity to explore a single sake from Terada Honke quite deeply… that is, to compare three versions of the same basic brew.
Continue reading
the sake I chose for January– Hakuto Tokubetsu Junmai, Tahoma Fuji Namagenshu, and Bizen Maboroshi Junmai Ginjo-- are a bit of a diary entry. The original plan was to share fresh Tahoma Fuji (Seattle) and Shirafuji (Woodinville) to highlight our small PNW brewers but the Shirafuji shinshu isn’t yet ready, they’re bottling next week. So January club took a few unexpected turns, much like the unexpected turns of January. The good, the bad, the insightful: January 2024 in a nutshell.
Continue reading
For December 2023 sake club, in honor of the recent arrival of two super-fresh Kokken Shuzo bottlings, the (aged) Yamahai Junmai and Tokubetsu Junmai, I did a comic deep-dive into Kokken Shuzo and the recent history of Fukushima sake. Using original watercolor art to illustrate this story, we dip into the Kokken name, their illustrious toji, the incredible research efforts of Suzuki Kenji and the evolution of Fukushima rice, yeast, and production methods, as well as the effects of the Daiichi nuclear disaster.
All original content © Sunflower Sake, Nina Murphy
Â