rice milling – Home Brew Sake

A Pictorial Look at the TwinBird Rice Mill

Back in August I posted an article about milling rice with the TwinBird Rice Mill. However, I was not able to include any pictures that could prove useful to those of a mind to construct their own mill. I committed to doing so and I now have the needed pictures.

As we shall see this arrangement seems like it can point the way to a very workable small rice mill that would handle, say, 20 lbs. of rice. Anyway, let’s take a close look at this baby. The TwinBrid mill is designed to run in the kitchens of Japan, handles 4 go (180ml) of rice at a time and runs on 100 Volts, 150Watts at 50-60 cycles. This makes it a good fit for US kitchens as well. The picture below shows the mill and its control panel. The left side is used to indicate the starting state of the rice to be milled, from white rice at the top to brown rice at the bottom. The right side is used to indicate the level of milling desired. Given this, I believe the setting shown gives the longest mill time setting.

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Milling your own rice with the TwinBird Mill

This article discusses how homebrewers might use the TwinBird Mill to polish / mill their own rice for homebrew sake.

Rice milling is arguably the first step in sake brewing. For some, it may be the rice harvest or even the entire process of growing the rice. Then for others, most home brewers, milling is not much more than the story we hear about how the pros do it. However, under the current situation this is hardly acceptable. As home brewers, we have, to my knowledge, only two options for milling levels; standard white rice (approximately 91-93%) and a rice milled for Ginjo grade sake (60%). For those who would like the chance of brewing other classes of sake other options are needed.

Recently, I got a rice mill from Japan; the TwinBird Mill. It’s not meant for sake but for home use with table rice. I was not sure that it would be able to mill the rice down as much as I wanted. That is that it would be able to mill rice to level far past those used for table rice. I wanted to be able to have rice ever where from table rice levels (about 90%) to daigingo levels (less than or equal to 50%). Maybe even lower levels. Could the TwinBird do the trick? The short answer is yes, but… Continue reading “Milling your own rice with the TwinBird Mill”

SakéOne Brewer’s Tour, last week

I describe a tour the lead brewer at SakeOne gave to a group of brewer from the Oregon brew crew.

This last weekend I joined a group of brewers for a brewer’s tour of the SakéOne Kura. Greg Lorenz, SakéOne’s Sakémaster gave the tour to a group of brewers from the Oregon Brew Crew.

As we gathered in the tasting room, we sampled the current nama on tap, a junmai ginjo genshu namazake; wow, very nice. What a way to start the tour. Once everyone had gathered we topped off our glasses and headed out with Greg in the lead.

Stopping in front of a picture of Mr Murai, Greg explains how Mr Murai was a man ahead of his time and how he thought that it was time to establish a Kura in the US. How he had pushed this idea for some time without success, until one day on a flight when he sat next to Grif Frost.

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