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Peisho
14th March 2002, 13:15
Is it possible to drink mirin like you would with sake'?
How does it taste?

P Goldsbury
14th March 2002, 23:31
Yes, you can drink real mirin, but is is very sweet. Since it made from mixing steamed glutinous rice with shochu, real mirin should have an alcohol content of about 14 - 15%. Real mirin (本みりん hon mirin) should not be confused with the みりん風 (mirin-fu) imitations usually sold in Japanese supermarkets. A sure sign of quality is the alcohol content, which should be on the bottle.
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P A Goldsbury,
Graduate School of Social Sciences,
Hiroshima University

J. A. Crippen
17th March 2002, 08:36
If you like sickeningly sweet drinks like many young girls tend to like (eg those horrible flavored liquor things that come in melon, grape, etc) then you might like drinking mirin.

It usually tastes similarly to sake, but it's a lot sweeter. You can get somewhat of an approximation by mixing honteri or corn syrup with sake (don't waste good sake on this, use something like plain Sho Chiku Bai).

Drinking mirinfu is out of the question. Not only is it not alcoholic enough to really matter, it stands a good chance of making you ill. You might as well drink watered down corn syrup. Don't bother cooking with it either, since the flavor is a total loss IMHO.

If you really want to drink sweet stuff that tastes good I'd recommend looking for mead. I can find bottled mead in my local liquor stores, but liquor stores in Alaska tend to be of a higher quality than those in most places... Mead is basically a drink made of fermented honey. Its taste is very reminiscent of honey, and it's very sweet, but it has a dry sharpness that smacks of good red wine.

Plum wine is a great Japanese treat, too. Surprisingly there's a fairly good plum wine that's quite common: Gekkeikan. It's in every liquor store in my city, even the cheap ones in the slums, and it's got a not-too-sweet flavor that rolls around on the tongue well. It's even cheap enough to cook with too.

I don't recommend drinking mirin, though. You'd be better off drinking sake sweetened with a little sugar, if that's what you want. Except for really high quality mirin, most of it isn't too great.

J. A. Crippen
18th March 2002, 03:18
\begin{flamage}

Slightly OT, but I just want to lodge my official complaint against the awful 'e with acute accent' used in the word 'sake'. Dammit, that's some old horrible French corruption that should die! It's "sah keh" not "sah kay". In romaji that's "sake", not "sakei". No accent.

I think the whole "sak'e" thing was caused by Hepburn's usage of it in his dictionary. It's been persistently maintained by people who refer to his dictionary as authoritative (which it isn't always, necessarily).
\end{flamage}

Peisho
18th March 2002, 12:57
I just said it that way because it sometimes gets confused with the word "sake" as in the word "forsaken". If you typed in sake in a search engine then you would come up with articles that say stuff like "for the childs sake" or "for the sake of Billy".
I should have made the word italicized instead.

I want to make my own sake but am not willing to wait 4 weeks for the fermenting and 6months to a year for the distilling process.
I looked around in about 5 liqour store and could not find any. I remember seeing some mirin in a health store but I just hope its not the watered down kind. I also hope that I dont rot my teeth drinking this stuff. Bottoms up:toast:

Peisho
20th March 2002, 12:41
I found some that is not watered down and with no additives other than the rice, water and sea salt. This stuff tastes like Italian liquor I once had a couple years ago. Its like cough syrup mixed with whiskey. Is there any way to improve the flavor?

J. A. Crippen
23rd March 2002, 01:59
Here's a little essay on mirin, copied from a Japanese cookbook I have.

Mirin was first produced very early in Japan's history, using glutinous rice (mochigome) and ordinary rice wine (sake). By the fifteenth century the technology for alcohol distillation was introduced and production of shochu, distilled from sake, began. Because with shochu the end product of mirin production was much sweeter than that produced with sake, shochu replaced the use of sake in making mirin.

Toso is a sweet drink made by infusing several Chinese medicinal herbs in mirin, and is drunk at the new year as part of a prayer for good health. Often toso is prepared with sake in modern times because it is difficult to find good drinkable mirin. Real mirin almost disappeared from the market around WWII and was replaced by synthetically mass produced mirin-fu which is only useful in cooking. Mirin-fu has replaced the authentic version because Japan had a shortage of rice after WWII. This forced mirin producers to search for substitute starch sources. During the same period the government imposed heavy taxes on honmirin because it contained enough alcohol to where it was regarded as an alcoholic beverage, as with sake. By 1955 the mirin tax had been raised to 230 percent. Sales of honmirin plunged and manufacturers were forced to produce inexpensive synthetic forms using other materials. Even though these days are over most manufacturers continue to produce poor quality mirinfu, to the dismay of chefs and mirin fanciers.

Mirin is typically produced by a two step method. The first step is producing a distilled liquor containing about 40 percent alcohol. The second step is allowing kojigome (rice cultured with koji, or aspergillus oryzae) and mochigome to ferment in the distilled liquor for 60 to 90 days. During this time starches in the rice are converted to sugar where the high alcohol content prevents the sugar from being converted into more alcohol. This results in a very sweet liquid. At the same time proteins in the rice are broken down into numerous amino acids. These processes are together responsible for the complex, rich, sweet flavor, thick texture, and golden yellow color of mirin. The matured mirin is then pressed to separate the mash and left to mature in a large tank for 200 days. The mash is used as a pickling base for vegetables.

The sugar in mirin is composed of glucose and maltose. This combination provides a more refined sweetness than ordinary sugar which is a combination of fructose and glucose.

In cooking mirin is often heated to cook out the alcohol before other ingredients are added. This technique is nikirimirin. Mirin is also heavily used in tare, which is used in such things as unagi no kabayaki and yakitori.

Synthetic mirin is sold under a number of different names, such as mirinfu, mirinfu chomiryo, ajimirin, and sometimes honmirin. These tend to have an alcohol content of less than 10 percent, compared to the average 15 percent in authentic mirin. Mirin should be used within two months after opening.