Our Little Sister: Sake and oranges

Jump to: the drinkheating and chilling the drink / trying it out / recipes

The scene

One evening Sachi gets home from a late shift at the hospital. Yoshino and Chika seem to have passed out but Suzu is still doing her homework.


All the beer cans and the sake bottle on the table and a passed-out Yoshino could only mean one thing: she's been dumped... again. Sachi tries to get Yoshino and Chika to drag themselves to their beds but both groggily declare they're doing just fine right where they are. Suzu however does head upstairs and Sachi urges her to tell her if she ever needs to talk about anything.

The drink

Yes indeed, it seems like Chika and Yoshino have been drinking Yoshino's relationship woes away. On Chika's side we see some cans of beer (could be Asahi but the somewhat italicised font doesn't seem exactly right - although I'm not able to make out what it would say otherwise) while Yoshino has apparently managed to empty an entire bottle. I'm going to guess it's sake, because the other likely alternative, shōchū, is much stronger and she'd be much more wrecked than she seems to be right now. So sake it is... I hope. It also looks like they've been eating oranges while drinking.

Heating and chilling the drink

I figured just downing an entire bottle of sake wouldn't be the best idea, so instead I decided I'd try to actually understand sake. I've certainly had it before but only a few times and always in room temperature. The most I'd gotten to actually try to get what sake is all about was in an izakaya in Osaka where a friend and I ordered a tasting set of three different kinds of sake. Due to my lack of familiarity with the drink and what kind of flavours you should be looking for in it, the most I could say about those three kinds of sake was "these are all pretty good and also surprisingly different". I'd however heard that you can get a lot more out of sake by drinking it in different temperatures which sounded like a fun experiment.

As it happens, I'd just bought a sake set the other day. What a coincidence!


I could've gotten cups with the same design as the tokkuri (sake pitcher) in the middle there but wanted to have a bit of color and variety to my sake cups. I got the set from good ol' Tokyokan here in Helsinki.

And, as it also happens, I'd gotten this nice bottle of sake as a birthday present just a few weeks ago. What a coincidence indeed!


It's Yamada-Nishiki Tokubetsu Junmai-shu Sake, which seems to have been about 20€, so towards the higher end of the sake you can usually get in Finland.

The other side of the bottle very helpfully had a ton of extra information about what kind of sake it was, its taste profile and also how it'd be best enjoyed.


So best chilled or warm, but not hot? Alright. Chilling the drink seemed easy enough, and since the bottle had been in room temperature, my friend and I just poured some sake into cups and stuck them in the freezer for a while. But how exactly do you warm up sake? Well, that's where the tokkuri comes into play. Following the instructions here, I brought a kettle of water to boil, filled the pitcher up until around the neck, covered the mouth with plastic wrap, put the pitcher in the water and turned off the heat. 

It looks like the plastic wrap is barely on there but it was better than it looks, honestly!

After around three minutes the kanzake (hot sake) was ready to go. The cups were small enough that it also didn't take long for the hiyazake (chilled sake, also known as reishu) to get to the temperature we wanted them at either. It was time to taste the sake! Before we continue, please bear in mind I'm in no way an expert on sake, wine or alcohol, so my wine tasting terminology might not be on a professional level.

Trying it out

We started with the room-temperature sake, as a sort of a control drink. We came to the conclusion that it was a pretty nice drink, a bit dry, vaguely fruity, with some deeper, earthier tones - but nothing particularly special.

Now, trying it warm, however... it was, simply put, a revelation. Heating up the sake had changed the taste entirely and made it delicious! It brought out the full, deep body of the drink and also the taste of the alcohol was more pronounced. Plus, hot wine always just feels nice to drink (see also: mulled wine in the winter), so that was a bonus as well.

The chilled sake was also excellent but in a completely different way compared to the hot sake. Chilling the drink hid the taste of the alcohol so the sake became a very light, refreshing and much fruitier drink. The taste actually resembled white wine quite a bit, just without any tartness.

The three sake cups weren't enough because there were two of us and we wanted to compare the different temperatures simultaneously.

Trying sake in different temperatures was quite an exciting experience. It definitely helped bring out the different sides of the wine and helped appreciate them in a way that would've been very difficult or impossible had we only drunk it in room temperature. I am much more interested in sake as a concept and would love to try different ones to see how they work in different temperatures, and will most certainly be doing just that in the future. Highly recommended if you haven't been able to get into sake before!

Oh yeah... I totally forgot about the oranges.

Recipes used

Heating sake: Kikusui Sake

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