Kanpai!
As the UK’s first sake brewery, Kanpai has had to work hard to earn its swanky, spacious Bermondsey brewery and taproom. We catch up with co-founder Tom Wilson to learn more about this incredible beverage, and how it came to be produced in central London
Robyn Gilmour
Photos:
Kanpai Sake
Saturday 27 July 2024
This article is from
Beer Cities Asia
issue 107
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When Tom Wilson returned to London after spending much of his early 20s working in New York, he found the UK’s capital lacking in some of the flavours he’d come to appreciate while living across the pond. He says that, seventeen years ago, the only sake you could get your hands on in London entered the country through the same two importers, and the offering didn’t reflect the diversity or quality of the product. Tom and his wife Lucy didn’t set out, from that point, to open the UK’s first sake brewery, though London’s hunger for craft sake rewarded their earliest attempts at producing it. The couple’s journey from co-founding Kanpai in 2016, to the swanky, Bermondsey brewery it calls home today has been far from linear, though Kanpai’s mission, reach, and reputation is completely unique because of it.
Sake can be a challenging drink to get to grips with. Its affiliation with high-end dining makes us think about it as a wine, though the quantity it’s served in makes it feel more like a spirit, and the way it’s made most closely resembles beer. At the same time, making sake and making beer look nothing alike, even though both beverages undergo the same biological processes, just using different cereals, and methods.
While Tom returned from New York with an appreciation of sake, he didn’t know the first thing about how to make it until he and Lucy travelled to Japan (long before the arrival of their now four and 18 month-old children). As food and drink tourists, they visited a sake brewery, at which point Tom — a recreational homebrewer — immediately recognised the similarities and differences between brewing beer and sake.
He explains that “in the beer industry, breweries buy their malt. So a farmer grows the grain, it goes to a malting company, they malt it in various different ways, and then they sell it to breweries to use. Whereas with sake, yes, there's a farm that grows your rice, but the equivalent of that malting process is carried out within the sake brewery. This happens by making and using koji rice.”
Koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, is the national mould of Japan, and is an essential ingredient when making miso, mirin, soy sauce, amazake, and sake. When making sake, rice is inoculated with the koji spore, so that the mould begins to grow and develop, eventually making enzymes that break down complex sugars and proteins in the rice. During the next stage of fermentation, those enzymes will make simple sugars available for the yeast to metabolise into CO² and alcohol.
Making koji rice is such a precise operation that a brewery’s method of producing and using the koji can yield radically different results. As such, intellectual property is a big part of sake production. Tom says that two breweries could use the exact same rice, water, and yeast, but depending on their method of making koji — with the same rice and mould — the sakes they produce will be completely different.
Tom and Lucy discerned pretty quickly that there was no point trying to make sake, if they couldn’t first make koji. So, what does the process of making koji look like? The sake rice is washed (to get rid of any rice flour left over from polishing, a process we’ll return to), soaked (to get the rice to the right absorbency for the spore) and steamed (to soften). From there, it’s transferred to an incubation room that can control the temperature and humidity of the environment in which the koji will be made. The rice is then inoculated with the mould, beginning the 72-hour period needed to produce the koji rice.
For the first 24-48 hours the koji rice is wrapped up in a bundle so the grains can hold onto the moisture needed for rapid mould growth on the outside of the grains. The next step in the process involves spreading out the koji rice and dehumidifying the environment. Drying the outside of the grain forces the moisture-seeking mould to move deeper into the grain, where prior soaking has created a tiny water pocket. The centre of the grain also contains most of its sugars, with more proteins residing in outer layers.
The mould’s movement from the outside to the inside of the grain generates thermal energy, increasing the temperature until the koji starts to produce the enzymes protease (at lower temperature) and amylase (at around 40°C). At this point, the incubation room shifts gears again, cooling to hold the koji in this amylase-making stage for as long as possible. Eventually, the heat of this process will use up all the water at the centre of the grain, meaning that if the koji isn’t fully cooled and dried, the mould will get so hot that it begins to kill itself.
“The enzyme mix that you can make with koji is crazy,” says Tom. “People are literally using koji to break down plastics and all sorts of other stuff. However when it comes to sake, we’re mainly interested in protease which — depending on how much of the enzyme we make with the koji, and how much protein is present in the rice we use — will dictate how savoury, or umami, the finished sake is. Similarly, the amylase produced will decide our overall sugar producing ability. This combination of factors is really kind of the underlying building blocks, or molecular structure, that our yeast can then access to make its flavour profiles.”
As Tom and Lucy began experimenting with koji and sake making at home, they documented their exploration on social media, just for fun. No sooner had they bottled and distributed their first few batches among friends and family, interested commercial buyers started getting in touch online, asking for samples, and further information on where they could buy it. “We were like, ‘this is homebrew’” Tom recalls, still amused and perplexed. “But I guess it was really off the back of that, that we starting thinking ‘hang on, there might be something bigger in this’.”
It was around that time that Tom and Lucy also started engaging with HMRC, to see if they could secure a licence to brew sake, at which point they realised such a licence had never been issued in the UK before. Then, after almost a year of back and forth — mostly explaining what sake is — in January of 2017, Kanpai was issued with a licence that would allow it to graduate from a kitchen sink setup in Tom and Lucy’s flat to a small lockup in Peckham.
While navigating the challenges of transitioning from 25L to 500L, Tom and Lucy got to planning Kanpai’s official launch, crowdfunding the cost of ingredients and packaging of its first official brew. “We ended up getting that first brew secured to launch in Selfridges,” says Tom, which I baulk at, before accepting this as evidence of London’s ferocious hunger for craft sake. From there, Tom says “we took a kind of self-perpetuating approach, where we’d make some sales, and put the profits into funding the next batch, which could then improve and evolve over time. And so that’s how we ran it for the first two years, it was pretty hand to mouth.”
Yet while Kanpai kept ticking along, doubling in size every couple of years and moving to increasingly spacious sites, not having a public-facing touch point with customers increasingly felt like a problem to Tom. After all, sake comes in a range of flavours, many of which British palates are not familiar with, and which can feel off-putting if you don’t have the framework in which to contextualise its ever present, ambient umami.
As such, educating consumers on the product became an essential part of Kanpai’s mission, and its dream of one day opening a taproom was born. “We very quickly realised that if we created a home that people could visit, it would be much easier to convey what we were up to here,” says Tom. “We could do tours, we could do tutorials, just basically having that kind of open door policy to demystify what sake is a bit.”
And it’s been working. Tom says he’s witnessed first-hand a growing number of people who realise how versatile sake is, and what a great tool it is to have in one’s dinner party repertoire. “If you’re going into a situation blind, and you’ve got no idea what your friend is cooking for dinner, you can bring a bottle of sake that you know is going to go with basically any food,” says Tom.
“Generally, with sake, you're working with low levels of detectable acid. Detectable acid is what really makes or breaks a pairing. Wine has quite high levels of detectable acid, which is what can make it more difficult to pair with certain foods. With sake, all you need to think about is generally how dry or how sweet you want your pairing to be, or if it’s going to be too aromatic for the food. With that little bit of inside knowledge you can make a pairing that’s astronomically good so easily.”
To give an example, Tom refers to Kanpai’s flagship Junmai sake (just meaning pure rice sake, no additives), Sumi. Gohyakumangoku rice (one of many varieties of rice Kanpai buys directly from growers in Japan) is polished to 70% — or a 70% ‘polishing ratio’ — meaning the outer 30% of the grains used has been polished away, leaving quite a substantial amount of that outer, protein-rich part of the grain intact.
“With there still being a decent amount of protein left on the grain, we use our protease to make quite a lot of amino acids,” says Tom. “The main amino acid that we make from protein in rice is glutamic acid. Glutamic acid plus salt is MSG. It’s the same thing that happens with soy sauce; you’re making loads of glutamic acid, then you're adding salt. So, if you’re drinking this sake and you eat anything that’s been seasoned with salt, you’re literally making MSG in your mouth.”
Tom is keen to stress that while sake can stand out and be the star of the dinner table, the incredible complexity, even magic of the drink, is that it can be a great team player, bring the goal closer, and charm the referee depending on what you need. We wrap up our conversation after this, I’ve heard enough. I’m completely sold on sake.
In celebration of beer’s close ties with sake, Kanpai has recently collaborated with By the Horns Brewing Co., to bring you a beer packed with rice and refreshing peach, and brewed with Japanese Sake Yeast. The result is a refreshing fruited ale with a dry and citrus finish.
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