Inside Kanpai, London's first craft sake brewery

The glass of pale liquid parked in front of me is what Tom Wilson has just described as "the special one". And he should know; he made it, in the Peckham brewery we're currently sitting in.

So new it's currently nameless, 'the special one' is the latest sake to come out of Kanpai, and to understand why Kanpai's head brewer is so excited about it, you don't need to know its backstory, its ingredients or even anything about sake at all; you just need to taste it. It's smooth, complex and alive with a vibrancy you only get from something utterly fresh and unadulterated, which is exactly what this is.

Categorised as muroka nama genshu (no charcoal filtration, no pasteurisation and no dilution) and straight out of the tank, it's the kind of sake that cemented Wilson's love of the drink when he and his wife Lucy first visited Japan. "This is what it's all about," he explains. "Jizake – pure, unadulterated local craft sake that you can only get in and around the brewery in Japan. And it's the same here."

Given that Kanpai is one of just two sake breweries in the UK – and the other is ultra-high-end, Japanese-owned Dojima, located near Cambridge – you'll struggle to get a taste of sake like this anywhere else in the country, let alone in London. Then again, as Wilson points out, you won't find anything quite like it in Japan, either. "We're using a completely different water and we don't have access to the equipment that's readily available in Japan," he says.

You'll struggle to get a taste of sake like this anywhere else in the country

This is sake by way of Peckham – innovative and experimental by necessity as much as by design – and that's as true for one-off brews like the muroka nama genshu as it is for Kanpai's core range of premium and super-premium sakes. Each has its own distinct character, but a faithful adherence to Wilson's own preference for "robust styles that really slap you around the face with the flavour of the ingredients, but are super-smooth to drink."

Known as nihonshu in its home country, sake is made by fermenting rice, along with water, yeast and a mould called koji, resulting in a drink with a uniquely umami character, that's typically far less acidic than wine and a little stronger on average. Also like wine, there are different styles and categories, determined by a wide range of things from the specific brewing technique used to how much the rice grains are polished (i.e. how much of the outer and middle layers are ground off to expose its starchy heart, the shinpaku), and the degree of dilution (with water and/or alcohol).

Though comparisons with wine can be helpful, sake production actually has far more in common with brewing beer, and for Wilson, who was already "messing around with homebrewing beers" when he visited Japan for the first time, making this distinction was a turning point.

burcinergunt

burcinergunt

"There was always this term 'rice wine' thrown around but I'd never really thought too much about how sake was made. Standing in a small sake brewery I had the lightbulb moment: fundamentally it's a beer. Proper sake – junmai-shu, purely fermented from a grain – has a much closer relationship with beer than it does with wine."

But the key difference between making beer and making sake isn't, as you might think, the rice (in fact some big commercial beers, including Budweiser, list rice among their ingredients); it's the use of koji. Rice on its own isn't fermentable – the starch needs to be broken down into sugars that the yeast can consume, so the sake brewer (or toji) steams the rice then inoculates it with koji mold, which is carefully cultivated to grow on (and into) the rice. As it does this it produces enzymes that break down not only the starch but also proteins in the rice, producing amino acids that give the resulting sake its unique umami character.

The koji rice is mixed with more steamed rice, water and yeast in a small starter called a moto or shubo, which is gradually added to larger amounts of steamed rice, rice koji and lots of water. Throughout this, the koji continues to break down the rice, while the yeast simultaneously breaks the sugars down into alcohol (and carbon dioxide) in a process known as multi-parallel fermentation.

Proper sake has a much closer relationship with beer than it does with wine

If all that sounds really complex, that's because it is, and the Wilsons' first home experiments with sake brewing were an eye-opener. "I immediately thought, 'Wow, this stuff is super-difficult to make'," he tells me. "There are so many ways you can influence the ferment to give you different outcomes, and it gave me a massive appreciation for the complexity of making sake."

Rather than retreating back to beer, the pair dug even deeper into sake, to the extent that "without even really knowing it, over about three years the spare room in our house had pretty much become a sake laboratory." At this point it was time to make a decision: "knock it on its head or find a lock-up and scale things up".

They chose the latter and found a small industrial space about 400m from the current brewery, which enabled them to take their experiments "to another level". Though at this point it was still a homebrew operation, their sake was starting to attract attention from other homebrewers, sommeliers, sake brewers and, inevitably, drinks buyers and retailers. In the end the nascent Kanpai arranged an exclusivity deal with Selfridges. "Then we had to go legit," explains Wilson. "We negotiated with HMRC for a licence to brew sake in February 2017, and we ran a small, rewards-based crowdfunding campaign so we could get enough kit, bottles and labels to produce that first batch."

A sign at the bar at Kanpai 

The first bottles landed in Selfridges in June 2017 – shortly after the Wilsons got back from their honeymoon – and Kanpai soon started to grow and expand. "We were doing supper clubs, tasting events, anything we could to spread the word," says Wilson. Having already spread into the neighbouring lockup, they soon outgrew that too and in summer 2018 the brewery moved to its current location in Peckham's Copeland Park, again thanks to a successful crowdfund.

It was, Wilson explains, a win for both parties. "It was our dream to be able to move here, and it worked perfectly because Copeland didn't want industrial manufacturing, including beer breweries." Sake doesn't qualify as such because it's effectively a zero-waste product, unlike beer, in which large amounts of spent grain need to be removed regularly from the brewery.

"The only by-product from production in this building is what's called sake kasu," says Wilson. "The multi-parallel fermentation means the rice grain is in the ferment until the final step, when it's separated from the liquid. This means the grain is enriched; it still contains active enzymes from the ferment, active yeast, and rich amino acidity and probiotics."

Sake kasu, it turns out, is incredibly useful stuff, and the majority of Kanpai's is sold throughout London for use in everything from ice cream to bread and even cosmetics, and especially for pickling and fermented foods. As Wilson points out, fermentation is having a moment in London's food scene, and this means Kanpai has carved out an unlikely niche for itself. "Because sake production's so hard – and we're the only ones doing it – we're the only place chefs can get a steady supply of super-fresh, high-quality produce that can enhance what they're doing."

Which brings us back to the unique position occupied by Kanpai in London, as the only brewer of a beverage most of the city's drinkers know very little about. While this obviously presents challenges that brewers (and the tiny number of winemakers) in the city don't face, it also provides a blank canvas for experimentation and education. Though Wilson's keen to point out this doesn't mean they're moving away from age-old sake-making techniques; quite the opposite, in fact.

"We're experimental at our core but the vast majority of our experiments have been around traditional sake-brewing techniques," he says. "Our approach to brewing sake is very traditional, but we like to add contemporary twists and innovations."

Kanpai's award-winning Fizu is a case in point; it's a traditionally made sake that's not only sparkling in the champagne style – which isn't unusual for a sake – but dry-hopped with Mosaic hops like a beer, and it's gone down surprisingly well on sake's home turf. "When people in Japan taste it they love it," says Wilson, "but their first question is: how did you think of this? We've got a really nice melting pot in London and we can draw from these other influences. For us, sake sits so nicely between three categories: beer, wine and spirits; it can be treated as all three things but it can take inspiration from them, too."

Kanpai's current and future experiments are in the same vein, with one foot in Japan and the other in London, ranging from ongoing collaborations with beer breweries
to maturation projects that borrow from other drinks categories.

The week after we meet, the brewery is due to bottle a sake that's been sitting in a red burgundy barrel for four months (for a Christmas release), and some of the brewery's sake has been maturing in barrel for up to two years. Aged sake (koshu) isn't unusual in Japan, but ageing in former wine, bourbon and sherry barrels – all familiar to brewers, whisky distillers and winemakers – certainly is. They're even experimenting with maturation in amphorae – clay vessels used in early winemaking that have a mythical status among hardcore natural winemakers, and even some brewers and cider makers.

As it happens, Wilson is also looking to create the closest equivalent sake has to natural wine, by experimenting with age-old ways of making sake that encourage naturally occurring bacteria and even wild yeast into the fermentation process.

As a result, these sakes "tend to have slightly higher acidity, with heavily umami, savoury, really meaty character," Wilson explains excitedly. "With the wild yeast style you can get funky, even slightly sour versions."

Unsurprisingly, then, these are his go-to sakes, the ones he's been dreaming of making since those early homebrew experiments. "In my head this is where I've wanted to get to," he says. "Nailing our modern method of making sake and reversing the rulebook to brew like it's 150 years ago."

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