While seemingly every other brewery was debuting a line of ciders or hard seltzers, Chicago’s Off Color Brewing was fermenting something entirely different: sake. Often referred to as rice wine, sake in fact shares a fundamental kinship with beer: They’re both fermented from a grain base. But sake occupies a much smaller niche than beer or wine in the United States, where only roughly twenty producers ferment and sell it. Brewing sake provided a creative outlet for Off Color Cofounder John Laffer and held the potential to become a new product category for the brewery. The key was to keep the side project at the right size.
Sake would seem an incongruous choice for many American breweries, but not for Off Color, which since it was founded by John Laffler and Dave Bleitner in 2013 has been yeast- and fermentation-focused. When beers based on ancient beverages and foeder-aged offerings with wild and native yeasts and bacteria are par for the course, it takes something truly off-the-wall to pique Laffler’s attention. That thing turned out to be koji. Koji is a fungus critical to sake making because its enzymes break down rice starches into fermentable sugars; that saccharification occurs at the same time and in the same vessel as fermentation. It is a yeast-and-mold nerd’s dream ingredient.
“It’s a fun process. Sake brewing is extremely hands-on,” Laffler says. “And it’s different. We make wort day in and day out, and after doing it for a decade now, it’s very predictable. We know what’s going to happen—mashing and lautering, there’s not a lot of excitement there. So just doing something a little bit different was reinvigorating.”