This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. I’ve had a few smoked beers over the last year and even a “smokey” sake from Proper recently, so I thought I’d give it a go on my own.
The idea originally started as a project for the Colorado Sake Social Club. I thought we might smoke some koji and see what happened, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it without damaging the koji spores.
I then started chatting with a baker friend and a bbq friend to see if they had any good ideas on how to make it work. Then I started to see that folks on the internet smoke rice to eat all the time. So I started messing around with their recipes a bit, called up my bbq friend and gave it a go.
I’m very sure this will need a lot of tweaking going forward, but for the first batch here’s how I started it.
I smoked 570g of uncooked, unwashed Calrose 60% at 250F for about an hour and fifteen minutes. It did color the rice a bit and there is some smoke odor, but it is lighter than I would have expected.
I also smoked 1061g of the same rice at the same time and temp, but I washed it first and did not completely dry it before smoking. There was some discoloration, but not much smoke smell to the batch. I’m hoping the wet grains sucked a bit of the smoke inside.
I’m thinking next time, and possibly the rice I have left for the final addition, might work if I wash and soak the rice, then use the smoker for a cold smoke steam cook. It might impart more smoke to the mix. I’m hesitant to do this initially as I don’t want to overpower the rest of the flavors with just smoke.
To this mix I’m planning on using some wild yeast from The Black Project brewery. I’m not sure what this will do exactly but the description is as follows:
This culture is a rare mix of microbes sourced from the Denver brewery’s coolship and wild yeast living on Colorado-grown Riesling grape skins used for beer production.
Flavor/Aroma Profile: Clean saison initial; Funky, sour with aging; varies batch-to-batch
So this may end up being a totally undrinkable sake, but it will be something interesting for sure.
