Meet the Woman Behind India's First Homegrown Sake
There’s a spirit brewing in a corner of Bengaluru and it isn’t beer. Manju Sara Rajan gets the lowdown on the making of India’s first homegrown sake.
It’s a little after 11 am in the morning. I am in a part of Bengaluru called Yelahanka, in the northern part of the city. Once you’re here it feels like a nice negotiation between city living and not-city living. There are plots of farmland sprinkled through the locality, groves of coconut treetops waving out from behind tall walls. In between, there are Tetris formations of housing complexes, glaze-faced corporate offices and the odd desultory mall. It is not the setting you’d expect for the assignment I was given: a sake tasting session with India’s only sake brewer.
When chef Maia Laifungbam comes out to meet me at the location where she’s been camped out perfecting her sake recipe, she reminds me of a new mom. She has that same quality of disheveled exhaustion that comes from expending all of one’s energy caring for just-born living things.
Chef Maia Laifungbam | Image by Saina Jayapal
Maia is India’s first certified sake brewer or touji; her newborns are three types of sake recipes that she’s been developing for the past several months. Her nursery, if you will, is a makeshift laboratory where she’s been cooking, incubating, and nurturing multiple trials of fermented rice to recreate Japan’s national beverage as an India-born and Indian-ingredient made sake.
The idea sounds very avant-garde, but 20 years ago no one would have thought Indian consumers would take to sashimi, sushi and teppanyaki the way we have. Today, Japanese cuisine is one of the most popular in the country. Chef Maia, whose father is from Manipur and mum from Goa, has been working in her mother’s home state for almost a decade now, since graduating from catering school in Manipal. She has created southeast Asian menus for several restaurants. It was from within the repository of Japanese cuisine culture that she felt an affinity for sake. “The chef in me thought, if I like sake so much then why don’t I learn to make it myself?” she says. “I went to learn at a 300-year-old brewery called Yamamoto Honke and lived there for an entire sake season; they only brew during the winter.”
Inside Maia’s workspace where sake trials are ongoing, using indigenous varieties of rice.
Maia and Yuichiro Nakata, her sensei in Kyoto.
Female brewers are a rare sight in Japan, so an Indian female trainee was even more unlikely. “Each brewery may take one student a year, and you must show that you’re willing to do anything, that you’re keen. That you’re willing to sweep the floor, anything that needs doing. It took me about 8-9 months to get a place at Yamamoto Honke.” Once she did, Maia went from being head chef and managing raucous kitchens to the bottom of the ladder, an apprentice lucky to have earned a place to be taught. Initially, the cold winter, hard labour and the isolation of speaking so little — sometimes, one word a day since she didn’t know the language — took a toll. But, she persisted. “The Japanese like Indians are bonded very much through food and dining together, so I believe that my ability to eat absolutely anything helped a lot,” she says. “Once I settled into the routine it changed me for the better and helped me actually achieve the necessary discipline and mental state required for what I am doing.”
Making Sake in India
Sake is essentially born of just three ingredients: water, rice and Koji, a type of fungus that is only grown in Japan. For Maia’s ‘homegrown’ version of the beverage, she is using Indian varieties of rice and imported Japanese Koji. “It was an absolute joy to see some of our indigenous grains from the Northeast produce good quality sake. As it’s a new grain I am also still discovering their properties, structure and reactions to a timeless fermentation process,” she tells me.
The week before I got there, some members of the Japanese consulate paid a visit to test Maia’s sake versions. “They were very happy,” she says. “Sake is not just an alcohol, it is a cultural icon that I am taking from another country. I have to be very careful that certain standards are respected, and the right people think that it can be called sake.”
Sake is a delicate drink that stands on its own, unlike vodka and many gins | Photo by Saina Jayapal | Location: WIP, Bengaluru
When I meet Maia, she’s been recipe testing for three months. From four varieties of rice, she’s identified three—she won’t yet reveal which—with the right flavour profile. She’s attempting to create from these indigenous rices, “a Kyoto-style sake that’s soft, sweet, light and easy to drink”. She’s working out of a place that’s more lab than kitchen — tube lit, with a granite-topped worktop and a large walk-in cooler. The tools of her innovation are simple: a rice cooker, a mercury-crowned thermometer, kakishibu sacks for straining the sake, and bottles of packaged drinking water. She works alone, doing everything from recipe testing to the washing up. The discipline she gained in Kyoto has held her in good stead.
The process of making sake is complicated in its simplicity. On the one hand there are just three ingredients, but sake is like a mirror, it reflects in taste everything that touches it. Which means Maia is as fastidious as the mother of a newborn preemie. Wash a utensil the wrong way and the final drink itself will take on the aroma. “For that crisp, clean flavour, you have to watch it like a hawk,” she says. For a beverage with so few ingredients and methodologies, ‘making’ is about understanding the best-case ratio of rice to fungus and about knowing when to stop interjecting into the fermenting process. Using a shaker, Maia sprinkles cooked rice with Koji and then monitors it every two hours, for 48 hours — checking the temperature to see how the fermented rice is growing, and the sugar levels on the rice.
During those two days, the temperature of the fungus-tinged rice must be maintained within 30 to 36 degrees Celsius. The room she’s cooking in is usually at 33 degrees Celsius. Maia has even slept on the floor of this lab while this process is on. When the brewing process begins, she takes the fungus grown rice and keeps feeding it at intervals, like sourdough, till she understands what kind of sake she wants to make. She feeds it, monitors it for 20 days or so, tasting every day while it is fermenting. Once she’s decided that it is done, she distils the concoction through kakishibu sacks. And, kampai!
The Taste Test
Maia has her three sake babies ready for me for the tasting: Three types of sake from three different strains of rice, made through three mildly different methods. Sake is approached very differently from wine. For one, there is no particular scent, except for a light note of fermentation. I begin with No. 2. It is one of Maia’s driest ones, and it reminded me a little bit of white wine, crispy and light. It had cooked or rather fermented for about 25 days from its last feeding of rice. For me what struck me the most about that first taste is how ‘fresh’ it tasted. With 15%-16% alcohol percentage, it was stronger than beer, but for a pure alcohol beverage it goes down with tremendous smoothness. We’re not going in any order so I’m on to No. 3 next. It was warmer than its sibling and perhaps for that reason tastes more dense and sweet. With both versions, the first gush of taste hits you at the tip and centre of the tongue and smooths out as you swallow it. The last of her babies I try is the one Maia calls No. 1. It was fruitier, with a lower alcohol percentage and a fuller mouthfeel.
The beverage is so delicate that to be able to tell its significant differences, as a brewer one would have to sensitize the palate. Maia has given up smoking and her ‘chilli habit’ to keep her palate sensitive. I taste what is an extension of her palate, a direct connection between product and producer. It is a very different experience from tasting a standardised recipe. “I already have my recipes,” she says. “If I have to make 5,000 or 10,000 litres then I just need to multiply it.” I’m not a fan of white wine, which I find is either too sweet and fruity or too dry. Sake feels like a crisp and gentle compromise, a sensitive drink that works well as an accompaniment to both a kebab or karage. This is a drink that holds its own, unlike vodka and many gins. Sensitive but strong enough in character.
The chef plans to launch her namesake sake brand, Maia, in June, in Mumbai and Bengaluru, with a brewery located in the southern city. She’s chosen the more intensive route by entering the market through a food and beverage proposition, rather than only retail. She is confident that the time is right for a homegrown version of the Japanese alcohol, and that the delicate beverage can be adapted to Indian palates, despite our affinity for drinks with a certain tagda-quality. The Maia brand will launch with two products: nigori, a cloudy flavourful unclear sake, and junmai, which is the traditional clear sake. “I see it fitting in everywhere,” she says. “Sake is the perfect companion to anything. If your friends want to do shots but you’re not a heavy drinker, take a sake shot instead of tequila.” Making the product in India will make it pocket friendly and tastier. Raise a toast to that!
Manju Sara Rajan is an author, editor and arts manager based in Bengaluru..
Banner image by Saina Jayapal.
ALSO ON GOYA
