Japanese tea is always
drunk piping hot and without cream or sugar. You
are encouraged to slurp it, to suck air in with
the tea, while will cool it a bit.
Sake is a fragrant, pale gold, faintly sweet rice wine,
with a taste similar to good cherry. It is served hot
in the winter, cold in spring and summer.
Biru means beer and several Japanese
varieties are served in sushi bars, all of excellent
quality. Kirin has a rich, nutlike flavour while
Sapporo Is more bitter and lighter like the European.
Asahi is the sweetest closest to the taste of
the American beer. Beer has a clean, refreshing
quality that goes well with sushi and if you are
a beer fancier, you should definitely try a Japanese
beer.
Five crucial elements are involved
in brewing sake - water, rice, technical skill,
yeast, and land/weather. More than anything else,
sake is a result of a brewing process that uses
rice and lots of water.
Premium sake has easily proven itself to be worthy
of appreciation on the same level as fine wine. The
fragrances, flavors, complexity and nuances can draw
you in and fascinate. And the range of these flavors
and fragrances, while admittedly within a narrower
bandwidth than the wine world can hold, are incredibly
diverse.
A natural extension of all this is the concept and
practice of matching food and sake. With the advent
of fine sake in the west, not only does the door open
for this bold new world of match-making, but at the
same time the sake industry duly inherits a veritable
responsibility to educate the interested public on
how to go about this.
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The
beverages served with sushi –green tea, sake
and beer –are more than mere thirst quenchers.
Tea and sake are ancient and they are as much a
part of the Japanese Cuisine as fish and rice. They
complement the subtle flavours of seafood and like
a perfectly chosen wine, serve to enhance food,
not just wash it down.
