With autumn and falling temperatures, the time for drinking hot sake is again arriving - or is it?
Visitors to Japan often make the acquaintance of Japan's national drink via the warm or even hot variant in a flask and small cup of ceramics. Unfortunately, the sake they get served in those cases is usually of the cheaper kind, the sort to which a lot of alcohol has been added instead of being based purely on rice. And it is usually served much too hot in order to hide the lack of taste. The hot alcohol attacks your nose and the taste is burning. There could be no worse advertisement for sake...
No, the custom should be turned on its head. Sake should in the first place be drunk cold, even in autumn and winter. I advise you to select only premium sake (ginjo, daiginjo, junmai or at least honjozo) and give the cheap stuff from paper packs and supermarkets the cold shoulder. A good junmai costs only between 900 and 1300 yen for a 720 ml. bottle, a ginjo just a few hundred yen more. Also try to find an izakaya where, besides the unbranded (hot) sake which is always questionable stuff, they have some types of jizake, premium sake brands from smaller breweries.
If you have never drunk sake cold yet, you will be very pleasantly surprised at the delicious taste of a cold premium sake. Of course cold sake should be drunk from a glass rather than a folkloristic sake set. There is a whole world to discover!
