Inside Sake
Two hours in the kura during Sake Week Vienna. Kōji, moto, moromi, press – and everything currently in the tanks, poured. Fifteen places per session; no prior knowledge required, curiosity is enough.
Two hours in the kura during Sake Week Vienna. Kōji, moto, moromi, press – and everything currently in the tanks, poured. Fifteen places per session; no prior knowledge required, curiosity is enough.
An evening of sake and new friendships in Taipei, and a first taste of what is happening in Taiwan: different approaches, different ingredients, the same curiosity about where sake can go beyond Japan.
A perfumer walked into the brewery, archived every aroma, documented every tasting note, and wrote about Kinshachi for popchop magazine. What stayed with her, she said, was the people and the respect for the process.
Our summer sake. Fresh, fruity and gently aromatic, brewed with alpine water and organic Selenio rice from Piemonte. Light on its feet and still very much Kura Wien. Best served cold, for no better reason than that the sun is out.
The only European kura invited to Tokyo. Three bottles carried across the world – Junmai Muroka, Marumero and Junmai Muroka Seishu – and poured for the brewers whose craft we borrowed. Sake life in Japan always overcomes expectations.
Marumero like a pulse under silk. Wild cherry, a red whisper. Heat without fire, night without edges – a distant fever, soft on the tongue, gone before morning.
Halfway. Not beginning, not end. Rice breathing, cold concrete, a sip in the dark. Winter almost gone and the moromi whispering; the tōji dissolving into the hum.
Steam like winter fog, warm rice like a quiet hearth, hands moving slowly as if listening. Kōji begins here, in the half-light, where time softens – before fermentation, before flavour, before words.
CREAM Vienna, 6 and 7 December: junmai namagenshu from Bio-Arborio and Wiener Hochquellwasser, 90% polished, unpasteurised and undiluted – poured and sold at the Reaktor all weekend.
Sake Week Vienna closes. A week in which the city found out it had a brewery of its own, and we found out how many people were waiting for one.
October 1st marks the official start of the brewing season in Japan – and World Sake Day. We took that day to reopen the brewery under its new name: Kura Wien. Thank you to everyone who came; without you we would not be here. And yes, that is our new shubo.
A pallet of organic rice arrives from Piemonte and the season begins again. As the harvest starts down there, a new chapter opens up here.
Wash, steam, inoculate, repeat. The shubo is the small, concentrated, slightly feral beginning of everything that follows – alchemy in motion, letting the rice come alive.
Batch five, day thirty-three. The press is done and the lees are still warm. If you are in Vienna, come and take some: kasu goes into soup, into marinades, into bread, and into very good things with beef.
Brewing days, open doors and new bottles land here first – and on Instagram, at @kura.wien.