Kikusui Shiboritate and Perfect Snow: Two Sakes That Skip a Step

Most sake gets pasteurized and then cut with water before it's bottled. Both of these skip at least one of those steps, and you can taste exactly where.

Kikusui is a Niigata brewery, and these two cup sakes are the ones we hand people who think they know what sake is.

Kikusui Shiboritate

Shiboritate means freshly pressed.

This is nama, unpasteurized, and genshu, undiluted. Niigata rice milled to 70%, bottled at 17.5%.

Nama sake keeps a brightness and a slight liveliness that pasteurization flattens out. Genshu means nobody added water to bring the strength down, so it arrives at full concentration.

Aroma: Rice, melon, citrus

Taste: Crisp and dry, with banana and green apple

Finish: Sharp, mineral, with real umami behind it

For something undiluted it drinks remarkably clean, which is the Niigata influence showing up.

Kikusui Perfect Snow

The opposite experience from the same brewery.

This is nigori, unfiltered, with rice solids left suspended, and it's genshu as well. 21% ABV, which is high even for undiluted sake, and it's Japan's best-selling nigori.

Look: Opaque white, which is where the name comes from

Taste: Thick, creamy, sweet, with real texture from the moromi particles

Finish: Lush and confectionary — cream, sweet rice pudding, a lactic edge

It drinks like dessert and hits like a spirit. Both of those things are true at once, and people routinely forget the second one.

How We Serve Them

Shiboritate cold, and drink it while it's cold. Nama sake is the one style that genuinely suffers from sitting around.

Perfect Snow cold and shaken first. The solids settle, so if you don't rouse them you're drinking two different sakes from the same cup.

Pair Them With

Shiboritate with sashimi-leaning things, handrolls, crispy rice, scallop skewers.

Perfect Snow with heat. Spicy edamame, spicy ramen, pork kimchi. The sweetness and the fat in the texture put out chili better than beer does. It also works as dessert with matcha mochi ice cream.

Try Them at Juraku

Both are on the cup sake list at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side.