ISSUE 014  ·  NOVEMBER 5, 2026

It's the first week of November, and in a lot of the country the nights have finally turned cool enough for warm sake. Brooklyn Kura agrees: its Sake Studies Center is holding a warm sake tasting tomorrow night.

So this issue runs on heat and history. From the Old Guard goes to Nara, where temple monks worked out how to start a sake in the 1400s, and where a 300-year-old brewery called Yucho still makes it that way. Its bodaimoto, Takacho, is One Bottle. The Explainer covers warming sake at home. Sake 101 explains the starter itself.

Last Call has five ways to drink sake with other people before the holidays.

Nearly six hundred years ago, the monks at Shoryakuji, a temple in Nara, had a money problem. Their costs were rising and the government's support was shrinking. So they made something to sell, and what they made was sake. By Nara Prefecture's account, a shogun called it "simply the best."

Their secret was the start. Before a big batch of sake ferments, a brewer grows the yeast in a small starter first. The monks soaked raw rice, with a little steamed rice, in water for a few days until the water turned sour with natural lactic acid. That sour water kept the bad microbes out, which meant they could brew even in the heat of a Nara August. The method is called bodaimoto, after Bodai Mountain, where the temple stands, and Yucho Shuzo calls it Japan's oldest yeast starter.

Then it disappeared. The temple brewed for about two centuries, and by the mid-1600s it had stopped. In 1996, a group of young Nara brewers decided to bring it back, and Yucho, a brewery in the town of Gose founded in 1719, was among them. With the prefecture's research institute, they collected lactic bacteria, yeast and koji (rice grown with a friendly mold) from the temple's own mountain. In January 1999 they made the first new starter on the temple grounds.

They've gone back every January since. Each brewery takes home a share of the starter and brews its own bodaimoto, so no two taste alike, and the prefecture counts eight Nara companies making it today. Early January is also the temple's Bodaimoto Sake Festival, when visitors can watch the starter being made and taste the new releases.

Yucho's current head, Chobei Yamamoto, the 13th generation, is better known for new ideas; Kaze no Mori, the brewery's flagship, is his family's modern line. In Rice, Water, Earth, Nancy Matsumoto and Michael Tremblay describe him keeping one tank of bodaimoto as a preserved piece of the past while he pushes the rest of the brewery forward. He told Umami Mart's Yoko Kumano that making sake is "layering techniques." His oldest layer comes from a temple.

BODAIMOTO JUNMAI  ·  NARA, JAPAN

Takacho used to be Yucho's flagship name, before Kaze no Mori. Today, the brewery says, this bodaimoto junmai is about all that's left of it, a bottle made to taste the way sake did in the age of the temple brewers. The label calls it "The Regal Hawk."

Expect something different. Yucho describes it as rich and sweet with vibrant acidity. Umami Mart, which carries it, calls it "something for the geeks among you," with layers of lactic acidity, cheese and green apple, and suggests it with fermented food, lamb or steak. They say it can go chilled, at room temperature or warm. With The Explainer right below, warm is the obvious experiment.

Where to buy: Umami Mart in Oakland, California, $54 for 720 ml, online or in the shop, checked November 4, 2026.

Warm sake is kanzake, and Japanese has a whole ladder of words for it, roughly every nine degrees Fahrenheit. SAKETIMES lists them: hinata-kan, "sunny spot," about 86°F; hitohada-kan, body temperature, 95°F; nuru-kan, lukewarm, 104°F; jo-kan, 113°F; atsukan, hot, 122°F; and tobikiri-kan, "extremely hot," 131°F and up.

Kikusui, a brewery in Niigata, calls 104°F to 113°F the sweet spot. Go hotter, it says, and the aroma sharpens and the sake turns drier.

What to warm: a Liquor.com guide says to pick sakes with umami and richness rather than fruity or flowery ones, and to keep top-tier bottles polished to 35% or less in the fridge. Heat, it says, brings out nuttiness and umami and gives the sake a velvety texture and a long finish.

How to do it, Kikusui's way: fill a ceramic flask about 90% full and cover the top with plastic wrap. Bring a pot of water to a boil, turn off the heat, and stand the flask in it, with the water about halfway up. Lift it out when the sake rises to the mouth of the flask, a few minutes at most, since the longer it sits the more alcohol it loses. Touch the bottom of the flask: if it feels fairly hot, you're there.

A microwave works in a pinch. Kikusui's number is about 40 seconds at 600 watts for 180 ml, stopping halfway to swirl, but it heats fast and unevenly, so the water bath is the better habit.

Shubo (酒母) is written with the characters for sake and mother: it's the starter. Brewers grow a big, healthy crowd of yeast in a small batch of rice, koji and water, then add it to the main tank. Lactic acid keeps that young yeast safe, because yeast handles acid and most rival microbes don't. Most sake today uses sokujo, where the brewer adds lactic acid and the starter takes about two weeks. Kimoto and yamahai let bacteria living in the brewery make it, which takes about a month. Bodaimoto sours its water before the starter even begins.