For Maho Otsuka everything is about timing. By Stacey Leasca on January 01, 2021
As the toji, or master brewer, at Shoutoku Shuzo, a sake brewery in the Fushimi district of Kyoto, Maho Otsuka carefully keeps track of the time the rice is steamed, how long it sits with water,
koji, and yeast to ferment, and just how long it takes to press and bottle for sale. Some of this process takes hours, some of it takes days, and some takes weeks. But for Otsuka, that’s okay, because sake making is a 2,500-year-old process that she’s spent 20 years mastering, and a job she plans to spend the rest of her life perfecting. It’s also a professional field she could have never entered had she been born just a few years earlier, making her not only a master at brewing but a master of timing as well.