More Finely Polish Rice
Processing is critical for Sake brewing to create the basement of Sake. By carefully polishing rice, the grains of rice thoroughly become well-shaped. It’s called “flat polishing” and leaves the core of rice more than conventional polishing, and the taste becomes cleaner and smoother.
Only Polish the Unnecessary Part Out
As you may know, brewer’s rice has the cluster of starch in the center of rice grain, and it’s only necessary for fermentation. The surface of rice grain contains fat, protein, vitamins, and so forth. Those components will make the taste of Sake complex and rich, but it also has the risk to become the off-taste too.
That’s why we polish rice and use it for fermentation. However, the conventional polishing polishes rice to the round shape; but the original form of rice is oval, and the shape of starch is also oval. It means the usual way polishes necessary parts and leaves the unnecessary part a lot too.
That’s why the flat polish makes the taste of Sake cleaner and smoother than the normal polishing method, even though the polish rate is the same.
Slowly and Carefully Polish Rice
Because the rice polisher is huge and expensive, most of the breweries outsource rice polishing to a specific company. However, they need to handle the huge amount of rice to polish, so they polish rice at high speed.
This makes the shape of polished rice round. A few breweries own their own polisher and take much longer time for polishing and make the “flat polishing” happen. There are several more settings for making flat polishing but simply said, “flat polishing” is the way to polish rice more carefully and slowly to bring its best characteristic out.
Please be aware that conventional polishing takes about 3 days to polish 60% out, and flat polishing takes much longer time….