By: Maegan Cheng
The weather outside may have been frightfully cold, but inside Izumi, Ontario’s Spring Water Sake Brewery, hearts and tummies were warm! Attendees spent a great afternoon together, inhaling the flowery scent of fresh sake, learning and drinking together.
Usually, tour groups don’t enter the actual brewing room, but due to the size of our group, we got to go in and see things up close. It was neat learning about how sake is made. Izumi has preserved a lot of the traditional brewing process and come up with innovative ways to compensate for where our Canadian climate. For example, a sauna not for humans. We also heard some stories about the history of the building, which had been a granary and whiskey distillery in the course of its lifetime.
Of course, the most exciting part of any brewery tour is the tasting. We got to try 4 kinds of sake, the majority of which was freshly bottled, all with different flavour notes and ranging in alcohol percentage. Delicious!
Taking a look through what was for sale, we found sake you can’t get in the LCBO. There was also some yummy sounding ready to drink cocktails, like a Sakepolitan and Sake Apple Cider. There was also soap, and some lovely snacks made using the mash leftover from making sake, and containers of the mash itself (sake kasu). I learned it can be used in a variety of recipes, and also used as a face mask. Who knew?