Sake News from Japan / Sake Muse

Continuing my training extravaganza, the day after the first day of my tea course I set off on a grey morning to travel out to the London School of Coffee in Kingston Upon Thames for their Introduction to Cupping and Sensory. I arrived to find only the instructor, the...

This was another rather fortuitous event. After I decided to go to the International Wine Challenge (IWC) sake trophy winners tasting at the Japanese Embassy in London, I followed IWC on Twitter... and they were promoting WABI! As it turned out, I had booked to fly...

This was a classic case of a good deed coming back to reward you in expected ways. I gave my brother a ticket to a Sake Service Institute (SSI) tasting for his birthday last year, as a result of which he was put on a mailing list advertising this event. He forwarded...

The wonderful Emi and Mathieu held another session at MAME on Sunday 16 July, although it wasn't the same kind of tasting as they had been doing for the last few months! This time they took the exact same coffee... and filtered it seven different ways! They chose a...

There was a pleasant surprise waiting for me in the post when I got back from Cardiff - the results of my WSET Level 3 Award in Sake!As I mentioned in the write-up of the course, I was very worried about the tasting component of the exam as I didn't have a lot of...

I spent a few days in Cardiff in May, mostly to attend the conference of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting but also to enjoy a day or two of roaming around the city and getting in as much of its coffee culture as I could!There had been a coffee festival...

I had prepared some sake and chocolate for tasting (both alone and together) over the May bank holiday weekend, but we didn't get around to it. Instead, we ticked a very old item off our to-do list and cleared out our kellar (underground storage room) to prepare for...

April was busy for MAME, with not one but two tastings! (They held a fruit tasting earlier in the month.)This tasting was much more focused than the ones I'd been to previously. One coffee variety from one farm, processed three ways and sent to four roasters. Although...

I had only heard about pairing aged sake (koshu, 古酒) with chocolate, so I was surprised when Matthew Headland (@connectniigata) suggested pairing non-aged sakes. I had plenty of chocolate left over from our Easter chocolate tasting, so I decided to give it a try! The...