Brooklyn Kura, a sake brewery in the waterfront complex Industry City, is expanding in partnership with Hakkaisan Brewery, a Japanese sake producer. Asahi Shuzo, which makes the Japanese sake brand Dassai, is constructing an American brewery in Hyde Park, N.Y., to produce Dassai Blue, a brand for the United States market. It is expected to open this year.
In Hot Springs, Ark., a 24,000-square-foot brewery for Origami Sake — almost 10 times the size of Kato’s new brewery — is scheduled to open in May. Master brewers from Nanbu Bijin, a Japanese brewery, will act as advisers, but the financing and ownership is American.
“It will be the largest U.S.-owned brewery, with a capacity of one million liters a year,” said Matt Bell, the chief executive of Origami. “The goal, really, is to move sake into the mainstream.”
If Arkansas seems an odd place to put a sake brewery, the state is by far the leading producer of rice in the United States, growing nearly 40 percent of the national production. As for the other major necessity for sake brewing, Mr. Bell points out that Hot Springs is renowned for the quality of its water.
While sake comes in any number of styles, the basic ingredients are few: rice, water, yeast and koji, a rice mold also used for making miso and soy sauce that breaks down the rice starches into fermentable sugars, just as malting does with grains in beer production.
The variables, however, are many. The freshly harvested form of rice is brown rice, and though brown rice can be used to make sake, that use is rare. The husk and outer part of the grain is usually milled away to expose the starches. The percentage of the grain that is retained after milling, or polishing, will partly determine the style.
