2014 Sake Professional Course

Published: Jan 30, 2014 by Joe Larabell

To anyone who knows me, it should come as no surprise that I enjoy Japanese Sake (also known as Nihon-shu in Japanese to distinguish it from sake, the Japanese word for alcoholic beverages in general). Living in Japan puts me in almost constant contact with a steady stream of new brands as most restaurants which are serious about Sake make a point to bring new ones in pretty much every week. There are at least three restaurants in my immediate neighborhood where the staff knows that my preference is to drink something I haven’t had before. At this point, I don’t even need to look at the menu any more. So it seems only logical that I would eventually find myself in John Gauntner’s Sake Professional Course.

Sensei The course was everything I expected it to be. Five full days of nothing but Japanese Sake… until we were all practically breathing the stuff. The first three days were composed of lectures. The motto of the course is: “no sake stone left unturned” and that’s the plain truth. From styles and grades, to ingredients, to the entire brewing process, to oddball “just-barely-sake” styles, even to the current market outlook. I now feel like I can speak intelligently on just about any aspect of the subject.

But that’s not all. After each morning and afternoon lecture, there was a tasting period where John brought in various brands of Sake that demonstrated the principles we had just learned. We got to taste the effects of the type of rice used, the effects of how the rice was milled, the effects of subtle differences in the brewing process. Even though, by the time I took the course, I had experienced some 200+ brands of Sake over the years, this kind of “controlled tasting” was definitely a new experience for me. All told, counting the Sake introduced during the course and what we drank with dinner each night (yes… dinner was included every night), I counted just over 100 different brands of Sake.

Shubo But that’s still not all. During the final two days we visited four breweries in the Kansai area (Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka). The breweries were carefully chosen to represent both the smallest and the largest in terms of scale, as well as the brewery that makes Eikun and who managed to win Gold medals in the national tasting competition 14 years in a row. Of course, each brewery put out a line of its best products for tasting, bringing the total number of Sake products we tasted that week to somewhere around 130.

But there’s more… An exam is included as part of the course and, having passed same, I am proud to count myself among the 1000-or-so alumni of this course who have become Certified Sake Professionals. But even though the course was centered around Sake, it was also about people. This year saw 27 people from 11 countries attend the course and by the end of the five days I felt like I had met 27 Sake-drinking soul-mates. That alone (and the parties every evening, of course) would have made the course worth it for me. What I learned about Sake along the way was icing on the cake.

My thanks go out to John Gauntner (http://www.sake-world.com/) for pulling all this information together. Before him, there was precious little information in English about Sake (and not all that much in Japanese, either, from what I understand). The Sake industry and all Sake lovers owe him a great debt. Check out his website and, if it be your Will, order up a round of Sake the next time you see it on the menu. I’m sure you won’t regret it.

This post was originally published as: https://larabell.org/wordpress/2014-sake-professional-course/

Comments:

The Disqus comments section is currently under evaluation. You should not have to be logged in to post a comment. If you have any trouble or see anything strange in this section, please let me know. Thanks.

Legacy Comments:

The comments in this section were imported from the original WordPress post. If further comments are enabled for this post, you should find a Disqus form directly above this legacy comment section.

Doug Warmke (2014-01-30):
Is there an SPC Level II in your future, Joe? ;^)

Joe Larabell (2014-01-30):
Most likely. Level II, from what I understand, deals more with tasting than theory.

It’s funny how, every once in a while, if you listen to the subtle messages unfolding around you on a constant basis, you pick up on a pattern of small bits of information that seem to build into something substantial. That happened to me recently on the general topic of effortlessness. Like many would-be adepts, I have a number of daily practices that I fit into various parts of the day. Sometimes they pay off with feelings of increased awareness or energy but, if I were being totally honest, most of the time they feel like drudge-work… a part of the day that occurs more out of habit than anything else… with the basic idea being one of consistency rather than joy.

I was listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast today and ran across an interesting take on something that should be familiar to most Western Ceremonial Magicians. Eric Weinstein was talking about finding meaning in license plate numbers as he drives around (don’t we all do that when we first start on the Path?) and the way he explained it was:

"...it's important to notice what it feels like to discern meaning where there is no meaning... it's important to get in touch with the "as if madness" experience in order to guard against madness; so I'm hoping to suspend my insistence on Truth for periods of time..."

I’m not sure about the connection with madness, per-se… and I’m wondering if that wasn’t just a ploy designed to wrap up the thought before getting interrupted. I realized when he said that that another good reason for discerning meaning where there is none is to prevent intellectual ossification (my term… it didn’t appear in the podcast, as far as I know). The belief that one particular way of looking at things must serve as the filter through which we see everything else from that point forward seems to be common in most philosophies and pretty much all religions. Adherence to a strict theology makes us less able to evaluate contrary ideas on their own merit. On the other hand, by constantly playing fast and loose with one’s synaptic network, so to speak, one might stand a chance of maintaining enough mental flexibility to recognize a true Epiphany when it finally does come.

It’s ironic that avoiding intellectual ossification was one of the main points that Sam was trying to convey just moments earlier… that there’s no logical reason to use one or more points-of-view which happen to have been elaborated thousands of years ago over new points-of-view developed by one’s own reason in the present time. Of course, that’s easier said than done and when most people start on any sort of Philosophical or Spiritual Path, they’re usually not capable of the kind of deep reasoning that would discern the “true meaning” of the Universe at first glance… so we may need to use ancient philosophy and religion as a crutch for a while… in order to bootstrap our thinking to the point where we can reason with some depth on the Universe and our purpose within it. But I expect that we all have to eventually drop the rhetoric and design our own systems based on First Principles.

I was listening to an interview with the authors of the new book The Distracted Mind on NPR this morning and they touched on a favorite pet peeve of mine that centers on a basic misunderstanding of the term multitasking. According to Wikipedia, the first published use of the term “multitask” appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. Is is only recently that the term has been used in the common vernacular to refer to the apparent ability of humans to “concentrate” on more than one task at a time.