On Food and Cooking

resulting liquid can reach an alcohol
concentration of 20%, far stronger than
Western beers and wines. Chinese chiu and
Japanese sake don’t have the grapey fruitiness
or acidity of wine, nor the malt or hop
characters of beer. Because it’s made from
only the starchy heart of the rice grain, sake is
perhaps the purest expression of the flavor of
fermentation itself, surprisingly fruity and
flowery even though no fruit or flower has
come near it.
Why and how did Asians come up with this
alternative to sprouting grains? The historian
H. T. Huang suggests that the key was their
reliance on small, fragile millet and rice
grains, which unlike barley and wheat are
easily and usually cooked whole. Huang
speculates that leftover cooked grains were
frequently left sitting out long enough to get
moldy; and because there are air spaces in a
mass of grains, the oxygen-requiring molds
would have grown well and digested starch