SAKE TO ME!
respectable Portlandian — liked to brew beer as a hobby.
The two dudes wound up traveling the country together for two boozy weeks, stumbling into sake breweries and “drinking sake of a quality and complexity and a range we hadn’t seen before,” Polen says. Enraptured — and perhaps a little tipsy? — the two men made a pact: to try brewing the heady potion at home and report back to each other about their experiments.
After the jet lag faded, Doughan and Polen stayed true to their word and ordered sake-grade rice online. Sake needs very precise temperature control, so they bought chest freezers and bread proofers and started brewing. They were met with “a pleasant surprise”: their home brews were good. Like, “much better than we expected,” Polen says. Good enough for Doughan, now 47, to consider moving across the country, and for both men to start visualizing serious career changes.
In 2016, they quit their jobs and rented space in a Bushwick factory, before locking in their Industry City spot last June. It took them about a year and a half to hone their “junmai,” or “pure rice” sake.
“It has just four ingredients: rice, water, kogi [a type of rice mold] and yeast,” Polen says. (Other sakes may have additives, such as alcohol or sugar, but Polen and Doughan prefer junmai’s simplicity.) They sourced spe- cial sake rice from California and a small farm in Arkansas, experimented with different types of yeast and doused it all in good ol’ NYC water (“It’s fantastic, seriously”).
Doughan oversees the brewing process, which takes place in a madscientist backroom that patrons can peer into through Kura’s taproom. He keeps a careful eye on the blends as they ferment slowly — some for up to a month. Different grains of rice, strains of yeast and temperatures produce different flavors. Finally, in January, he and Polen bottled their first batch: a blend called No. 14, so named because it was the 14th recipe they made together. The light, floral drink is “very much in line” with the kind of high-quality sakes produced in Japan, Polen says. Cases sold out by Jan. 7; Polen had to drive them to wine shops around the city himself to keep up with demand.
Of Kura’s five flagship brews, Polen likens their “complexity and depth” to that of a nice white wine. He and Doughan prefer to serve their $9 to $11 drafts in stemmed wine glasses so sippers “get to enjoy the nose [of the drink] and open it up by oxygenating it.” (Those cute little ceramic cups so synonymous with sake drinking? “Completely unnecessary,” the gents agree, although they do stock a few pretty ones at the bar for the one hot sake they brew.)
You can even cook with their sakes like they’re wine: Nolita restaurant
Ramen Lab is using their brews in three of its ramen bowls through March 24.
Although they’ve only been open for a few weeks, Polen and Doughan’s pours are getting attention from sake fans and naifs alike. In the former camp is John Gauntner, a sommelier known as the “Sake Evangelist” to connoisseurs. He took two bottles of Brooklyn Kura’s stuff to a sommelier class in Tokyo, where it got the swishers’ stamp of approval, Polen says. On a recent Saturday, execs from Japanese sake company Fukuju stopped in for a drink and professed their admiration. As for the sake know-nothings (or “new-to-sake drinkers,” as Polen politely calls them), “they have low expectations of what they’re gonna see here” — but most of them leave “surprised and, like, in awe.”
Still, there’s a long way to go before the Kura boys achieve their loftiest goal: to help educate America’s sake drinkers until people can talk about it, sip it and come together over it the way today’s craft beer fans do. But for the guys, maybe it’s enough for now to see where their scrappy little startup takes them.
“Making something is incredibly cool,” Polen says. “Every time I drink one of these sakes, I’m like, holy s - - t, we made this.”