sake

Japan; rice brewed with koji mould, first mentioned in Japan by a Chinese record of the third century, with a brewing division at the imperial court from 689 and a first record of sake brewed with mould, koji, in 715

From China, where rice was first fermented into drink, to Japan with rice cultivation; brewed at the imperial court, then from the twelfth to the fourteenth century at shrines and temples that treated it as a commodity and refined the method; commercial brewers, under their own trade names from the thirteenth century, ending the religious houses' dominance by the sixteenth; an industry under the Tokugawa, with about 90 per cent of what Edo drank coming from Itami and Nada; first exported in 1872; graded for tax from 1943 to 1992; inscribed by UNESCO in 2024; brewed by a growing number of breweries outside Japan

Sake has been brewed under whoever held power: the imperial court set up its own brewing division in 689, when only the privileged could drink it, and the tenth-century Engishiki ranked it, clear sake for the high ranks and murky, unrefined sake for the lower class. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, as rule passed from the court to the shogunate, brewing passed to shrines and temples, which treated sake as a commodity and refined a method that still resembles today's; under the Tokugawa the government controlled brewing and adjusted the supply and price of rice. In the war years the state controlled sake's price and production and had it diluted with neutral spirits to save rice, and from 1943 to 1992 it was taxed by grade. UNESCO records that sake was first made only by women, that men came in as demand grew, and that the toji, the chief brewers, lead the kurabito, the brewery workers, in the practice and pass it on by apprenticeship; the master brewers came from guilds until owners of smaller breweries began to brew themselves. This establishes that control of sake passed between institutions while the knowledge of it passed from brewer to apprentice.