{"id":48121,"date":"2022-10-03T01:00:30","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T08:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/civileats.com\/?p=48121"},"modified":"2022-11-30T16:36:05","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T00:36:05","slug":"civil-eats-tv-women-brewing-change-at-sequoia-sake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/civileats.com\/2022\/10\/03\/civil-eats-tv-women-brewing-change-at-sequoia-sake\/","title":{"rendered":"Civil Eats TV: Women Brewing Change at Sequoia Sake"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story and video are a co-production of Civil Eats and Edible Communities<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>

Craft sake making\u2014both in Japan and abroad\u2014is still a very male-dominated world; for now, there are only three women brewers in the U.S., and two of them happen to work at Sequoia Sake<\/a> in San Francisco. <\/p><\/div>

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Noriko Kamei, her husband, Jake Myrick, and their daughter Olivia Kamei Myrick, 26, make sake together by hand in the first New World brewery to produce a second-generation heir. Kamei and Myrick share head brewer duties, and Kamei Myrick has already produced several sakes of her own. Instead of feeling outnumbered that two-thirds of his business is made up of women, Myrick says, \u201cI\u2019m proud that both of the women in my life are making sake.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>

\"Noriko<\/a>

Noriko Kamei, Jake Myrick, and Olivia Kamei Myrick at Sequioa Sake.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

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During the 10 years they lived in Japan as tech entrepreneurs, Myrick and Kamei discovered the unique appeal of nama, or unpasteurized sakes, which tend to be brighter and fresher tasting because of the living microbes they contain. Myrick was fascinated by sake brewers\u2019 ability to produce a wide range of flavor profiles from just rice, water, and yeast. When they returned to the U.S., they missed those fresh sakes and decided to make sake brewing their next start-up business, launching Sequoia in 2014.<\/p>\n

Sake is the more-than-2,000-year-old national drink of Japan, an agricultural product with roots in mythology and the Japanese Shinto religion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From their 2,500-square-foot brewery in San Francisco\u2019s Bayview neighborhood, the three make 12 different kinds of sake, most of them unpasteurized and all with organic rice. Kamei handles the most difficult aspect of the work, which is making the koji<\/a>, the fungus-inoculated steamed rice that is the blueprint for the sake she envisions in her head. The koji spores are added to the yeast starter, or shubo<\/a>, which touches off the conversion of starch to fermentable sugars.<\/p>\n

To this base, they add three rounds of steamed rice, water, and yeast then they filter the sake, sometimes pasteurize it, and bottle it. Kamei loves the trial and error aspect of her work, as she spends hours noticing and responding to minute changes in the koji. She compares the careful attention it takes to \u201cwatching a newborn baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kamei Myrick considers herself someone who \u201cperforms best in jobs that are more physical than mental,\u201d so sake making has been a good match for her. From 2016 to 2018, she spent time in Fukushima Prefecture working as a kurabito, or sake brewery worker, at Miyaizumi Meijo Brewery<\/a> and Akebono Brewery<\/a>. As the first female foreign apprentice, and part of a family that runs a brewery in the U.S., she says that the head brewers \u201cdid teach me more than they would to some of their own kurabito; they knew I was going back to Sequoia and was committed to making sake.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>