#fermentation science

The Japan Cooking Wine Market is a sector where ancient fermentation science meets 21st-century manufacturing precision. The process of making ryorishu involves the same fundamental steps as brewing high-grade drinking sake—steaming rice, adding kōji mold, and allowing yeast to convert sugars into alcohol. However, the "industry" has perfected the art of controlling this process to maximize the production of glutamic and aspartic acids, which are responsible for the umami sensation. This scientific focus on "flavor chemistry" distinguishes the Japanese industry from other culinary wine producers globally, making their products highly effective at improving the sensory qualities of a vast range of ingredients, particularly proteins.

Analysis of the Japan cooking wine market growth underscores the importance of technological integration in the brewing process. The Japan Cooking Wine Market was valued at USD 230 million in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 349 million by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 5.2%. Modern breweries are now using AI-controlled fermentation tanks to monitor kōji growth and temperature in real-time, ensuring a level of consistency that was previously impossible. This technology allows brewers to maintain the "Handcrafted" quality of their recipes while scaling up production to meet the increasing demand from the "Cooking wine for food processing industry," where batch-to-batch consistency is absolutely critical for the final food product's safety and flavor.

In the "Japan cooking wine industry," sustainability is becoming a major technological driver. New filtration techniques are allowing brewers to recover more usable wine from the fermentation lees (sake kasu), reducing waste and increasing yield. Additionally, many breweries are switching to renewable energy sources and lightweight, recyclable PET packaging to reduce their carbon footprint. These "Green Brewing" initiatives are highly appealing to the younger "Gen Z" and Millennial demographics in Japan, who are increasingly making purchasing decisions based on a brand's environmental credentials. This alignment with modern values is helping traditional brands stay relevant in a fast-changing social landscape.

"Japanese cooking wine market size" is also being influenced by the "Home Bar and Izakaya at Home" trend. As more people enjoy alcoholic beverages with food, there is a renewed interest in using "Drinking Sake" for cooking and "Cooking Wine" for specialized cocktails. This blurring of lines is creating a new "Hybrid Category" of products that are high enough quality to sip but marketed for their culinary versatility. Manufacturers are responding with smaller, more stylish bottle designs that look at home on a bar cart as much as a kitchen counter. This crossover appeal is expanding the consumer base and increasing the frequency of use, providing a healthy boost to the overall market valuation.

Chronic low-level inflammation in the body is linked to many diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, autoimmune disease, depression, accelerated biological aging, frailty, increased cancer risk & poor recovery from illness or surgery. It's one of the strongest predictors of long-term health outcomes. There are things we can do to help reduce or even prevent chronic inflammation. One of which the University of Nottingham described as a dramatic & simple way to reduce inflammation by eating or drinking kefir, which is one of the most probiotic-dense foods humans consume, far, far richer than yogurt. It also tends to survive digestion better than yogurt, which typically has 2-5 strains, mostly bacteria, whereas kefir has 30-540+ strains, bacteria & yeasts.

The 6-week study combined kefir with a diverse prebiotic fiber mix that actually feeds the good gut bacteria. The kind you find in yogurt are probiotics, but these won't increase helpful gut bacteria; they simply elbow out or crowd out harmful gut bacteria from getting a hold, which is why, ideally, you need both. Combining both types of microbes is known as a "synbiotic" because they work synergistically, reducing inflammation 75% more than fiber alone & 250% more than omega-3 fatty acids. Recommendations suggest about 1/2 to 1 cup of kefir daily, along with prebiotic sources such as the soluble fiber inulin from chicory root (the richest source), Jerusalem artichoke, garlic, leeks, asparagus, slightly underripe bananas (also a source of resistant starch), or store-bought inulin powder. These feed Bifidobacteria, the helpful gut bacteria. Resistant starch is the sort of carbohydrate that resists digestion in the small intestine & reaches the colon intact, where microbes ferment it into butyrate—the anti-inflammatory superstar.

italian style melt-in-your-mouth lemon cookies topped with a lemon glaze...

There’s an interesting connection between Italian lemons & the Americans’ mass production of penicillin. Italian lemon varieties once powered the global citric-acid industry. Before WWI, the global citric acid supply came almost entirely from Italian lemons, especially from Sicily & the Amalfi Coast. Italy has an ideal climate for growing lemons, from which citric acid was extracted from lemon juice by adding calcium hydroxide (Ca(OH)₂) to form insoluble calcium citrate, which was filtered out & then converted back into citric acid using sulfuric acid.

 This method was widely used in the early 1900s but was expensive & vulnerable to WWI shipping disruptions. That crisis pushed Pfizer’s James Currie to discover that Aspergillus niger could ferment sugar into citric acid—a cheaper & much more scalable method that ended America’s reliance on Italian lemon imports for citric acid. This transformed Pfizer from a chemical supplier into a fermentation powerhouse.  

Citric acid was extremely important because it was used as an acidifier, a flavoring agent in foods & beverages, a food preservative, a cleaning agent capable of removing rust stains, & in pharmaceuticals. By 1943 a lab technician bought a moldy cantaloupe at a market, & it happened to contain Penicillium chrysogenum (the ancestor of all modern penicillin strains). 

This is the final installment of the “brewing-in-oregon-series,” which has taken all the words I wrote for the first draft of my Brewing Industry in Oregon article and put them out into the world!

A maturing industry needed skilled brewers. Food science and studies on fermentation have long been a part of research at Oregon State University, but since the establishment of the Fermentation Science program in the Food Science and Technology department in 1995, OSU has been a leader in its education and training of the new brewers who opened small and independent breweries in local neighborhood communities and those at large-scale corporate breweries. 

There are other avenues for brewers and consumers in Oregon to learn and build communities. Headquartered in Portland and founded in 1979, the Oregon Brew Crew is one of the oldest and largest home brewing clubs in the United States. The Oregon Brewers Guild was founded in 1992 as a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for and promoting the state's brewing industry; it is one of the nation's oldest craft brewer associations. Two other important organizations were founded in Oregon and now have members worldwide: The Pink Boots Society was founded in 2007 by Teri Fahrendorf as a professional organization to support women in the brewing industries. In 2011, Pink Boots Society members created Barley’s Angels, a branch of the organization that served as an educational and social community for female beer enthusiasts; Barley’s Angels split off in 2012.

In addition to more breweries to choose from, consumers had other ways to engage with beer. The Oregon Brewers Festival has been held annually since July 1988 at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park in downtown Portland. Art Larrance, co-founder of Portland Brewing, approached Widmer Brothers, McMenamins, and BridgePort Brewing about starting a "Portland Brewers Festival Association of Oregon." McMenamins agreed to participate, but declined being an organizer, and the remaining three organized the first festival. Today, the Oregon Brewers Festival is one of the nation’s longest running and largest craft beer festivals. Other festivals Portland Craft Beer Festival, Festival of Dark Arts, Holiday Ale Festival, Bend Brewfest, various fresh hop festivals, and Mt. Angel's Oktoberfest.

The increasing popularity of homebrewing and accessibility of imported beers certainly had an impact on the preferences and palates of consumers, as did writing about beer in the public press. Fred Eckhardt was a well-known advocate, critic, educator, mentor, and historian, and his written work on beer and brewing encouraged generations of people to think about beer in new ways. Inspired by a 1972 visit to Anchor Steam Brewery, Eckhardt became an avid proponent of tasteful, complex craft brews. He urged people to focus on flavor, style, and experience in the Oregonian, and also wrote regular articles in national industry publications like Celebrator Beer News and All About Beer. He rose to prominence with his 1970 A Treatise on Lager Beers, a guide to homebrewing and the evolution of lager beer, and 1989 The Essentials of Beer Style. In more recent years, blogs, podcasts, and news aggregate sites have dominated Oregon beer news and information.

There are times when I feel like I barely make a dent in the backlog of collections. It’s a good problem to have, because it means people are donating collections, but tough when you need to be in the library to go through physical items and it’s a pandemic!

Last summer I processed some records from the Fermentation Science Program, and of course wrote a detailed history of the program. 

Here’s a post from 2019 with some of my initial fun finds. 

Guide to the Fermentation Science Program Records (RG 296)

What’s in the collection? 

The Fermentation Science Program Records consists of publications collected to support program faculty and students in teaching and research. This includes magazines, journals, and conference proceedings on brewing and distilling. The curricular materials include articles used for teaching and research bibliographies. Though not extensive, there are materials related to the "The Yeast Bank," OSU's Food and Fermentation Sciences Club.

What’s the history of the program? 

Food science and studies on fermentation have long been a part of research at Oregon State University. In 1996, the Department of Food Science and Technology became home to the nation’s first endowed professorship in Fermentation Science. It was also one of the first colleges to initiate a Fermentation Science degree and quickly grew into an internationally renowned graduate brewing research program. The Fermentation Science program, one of just a handful in the nation, has always focused on “hands-on” applied science, including the use of microorganisms as processing agents in the production of wine and beer, as well as a variety of other fermented foods such as cheese, yogurt, soy sauce, pickles, breads and fermented vegetables.

In 1995, University of Oregon alum James Bernau, then president of Nor'Wester Brewing Company of Portland and Willamette Valley Vineyard, gave $500,000 of Nor'Wester stock to establish a professorship dedicated to fermentation science in the College of Agricultural Sciences. Combined with $500,000 from a state matching program, the “Nor’Wester Professorship in Fermentation Science” was created. The Fermentation Science option was added to the Food Science and Technology curriculum in 1996. Additionally, the Nor'Wester Brewing Company gave OSU a small pilot brewery for research; it was installed in Weigand Hall. In 1996, Dr. Mark Daeschel was named the first Nor’Wester professor of Fermentation Science Technology; in 2001, Dr. Thomas Shellhammer took over the position and focused on the chemical and sensory analysis of hops in beer. Funding, faculty, and research allowed the program to set up a research laboratory that has investigated beer flavor, flavor stability, beer foam, hop chemistry, hop bitterness and aroma chemistry, beer processing, and sour beer chemistry and microbiology. In 2015, the Gambrinus Company, a San Antonio-based company that owned BridgePort Brewing Company in Portland, donated $1 million dollars for a new research brewery.

Beyond beer brewing, alcohol fermentation research at OSU has included enology and viticulture. Important milestones include the creation of a campus enology lab in cooperation with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission in 1939 and formation of the Oregon Wine Research Institute in 2009; fermentation trials on wine grapes in the 1930s and test plantings of European varieties at branch stations in Aurora, Medford, and Corvallis by Agricultural Experiment Station researchers in the 1970s; and the establishment of the Richard and Betty O'Brien Professor of Extension Viticulture in 2017. In 2013, a $1.2 million grant from lawmakers enabled OSU to add a distilling program to its current research for wineries and breweries.

There is a lot of processing and description work going on these days. One of the cool collections we got in summer 2017 came from Tom Shellhammer's office in the Food Science & Technology. We've called them the “Fermentation Sciences Program Records,” and while the bulk of the collection consists of periodicals related to brewing and distillation, there was also a little notebook from the student brew club. This club is a nice opportunity for students to build community and practice being creative brewers in the Pilot Plant.

Before reaching out to their current Food and Fermentation Science Club officers, I thought I'd check if we had anything in the Student Club and Organization Records, 1931-2008 (RG 276), which is a collection that documents the approval and recognition of more than 900 student clubs and organizations. Guess what? There were things! I'd hoped for something juicy like brewing logs or handwritten notes, but I did find some good finds that give wonderful detail about their operations.

The records for food and fermentation related clubs include annual review forms; constitutions and by-laws; lists of officers, members, faculty advisors; event and club registration forms; program information and evaluations (cider sale, streak fry in the fall, canned valentines); budget reports (expenditures and profits), and picnics and field trips (costs, locations, dates).

I want to share some pictures here, but my warning is that there have been a variety of names of clubs linked to the Food Science and Technology Department and you'll see those here: OSU Food and Fermentation Science Club, OSU Food Group, Food Science and Technology Club, Food Science Club, and the Food Technology Club. The Office of Student Involvement provides support services to student organizations and oversees the process for annual recognition of clubs and organizations.

This is the last page of the by-laws, but I love this personal note at the bottom!

Here is a full set of by-laws, which gives a really nice window into the purpose, organization, and operations of this club. 

Beer fans, do you recognize the president here? 

And my favorite “reconciling of budget.” Evaporation, what can you do?