Blue Current Brewery: American Sake business gets started with help from UMaine

Dan Ford, president and master brewer of Blue Current Brewery, first started experimenting with sake (Japanese rice wine) when he bought a homebrew kit. Now he is one of the top 100 master sake tasters in the world, and the proud owner of New England’s first sake brewery. With help from the University of Maine, Ford was able to get his unique business started. Realizing early on that sake brewing equipment could only be found overseas, Ford sought the expertise of specialists at the University of Maine. Ford collaborated with UMaine’s Advanced Manufacturing Center to help him design and build the equipment he needed. UMaine Cooperative Extension Food Safety Specialist Jason Bolton helped him design a facility that could safely produce his high-quality product. In this video, Ford talks about the sake brewing process and how the University of Maine was an invaluable resource to his company. To learn more about the services offered through UMaine’s Advanced Manufacturing Center and Cooperative Extension, visit: http://umaine.edu/amc/ and https://extension.umaine.edu/.

For more information about these and other innovation and economic development initiatives at UMaine, visit https://www.umaine.edu/econdev.

---

Closed Caption:

[music]
Hi, I'm Dan Ford, Blue Current Brewery. I'm
the master brewer and president of Blue Current
Brewery here in Kittery, Maine.
Blue Current Brewery is a saké brewery. It's
made from rice, koji, yeast, and water. Koji
is Aspergillus oryzae, similar in mold to
penicillin. It's used in fermented foods in
Japan. It basically allows you to access sugars
that normally would not be accessible.
Koji takes 54 hours to grow. It sort of propagates
across kernels of rice. At the end of 54 hours,
our koji comes back into our fermentation
room, and it is mixed with steamed rice, our
water, and our yeast. It's the most difficult
thing to brew in the world. It's multiple
parallel fermentation.
This is our rice steamer that University of
Maine built for us. John Belding from the
Advanced Manufacturing Center said, "Hey,
why don't you give us a shot at designing
it and building it?" The students built it.
It'll cook roughly 500 pounds or 200 kilograms
of rice at a time, which is amazing.
We've done a lot of problem solving. Dan came
up to the University of Maine for some testing
of different equipment.
He came up to the University of Maine pilot
plant. We did a whole bunch of things there.
In addition to that, we've worked on testing
of alcohol in his final product, his saké,
bottling equipment, all kind of things like
that.
All the equipment that you see here had to
be designed and built specifically for making
saké. I went as far as I could, but University
of Maine was a key that helped me unlock a
lot of potential for me with steaming rice
and being able to do a lot of technical things
that I wasn't able to overcome.
We're American saké. From that, we've developed
a taste that is suitable and we think is approachable
for the market of Americans
It's a little sweeter, gluten-free, sulfite-free,
and tannin-free. We're in Portland restaurants
all around Portland. You can find us in most
any Hannaford.