Someone hands you two bottles of sake. One says 45 on the label, the other says 23, and the second costs twice as much. The natural reading is that 23 is the higher grade, the way a higher star rating means a better hotel. Almost everyone reads it that way, including a lot of people who sell sake.
The number is not a grade. It is a measurement of something that was removed, and whether removing more of it is an improvement depends entirely on what you are drinking it with.
What the number actually measures
A grain of rice is not uniform. The centre is nearly pure starch. The outer layers hold most of the protein, fat, minerals and vitamins. In cooking, those outer layers are flavour and nutrition. In brewing, they are trouble: proteins and fats produce heavy, savoury, sometimes coarse compounds during fermentation.
So brewers mill the rice before brewing, grinding away the outside to get closer to the starch core. The polishing ratio, or seimaibuai, is the percentage of the original grain that survives. A 45 means fifty-five percent of each grain has been ground off and discarded. A 23 means seventy-seven percent has gone. Milling that far takes days in the mill, generates heat that has to be managed carefully, and destroys most of the rice you paid for.
That is the whole thing. The number tells you how much rice was thrown away. It is a measure of cost and of precision. It is not a measure of how good the result is, and the brewery behind these bottles has said so publicly more than once.
Two more words worth having straight. Junmai means pure rice: nothing in the bottle but rice, water, koji mould and yeast, with no distilled alcohol added. Daiginjo means the rice was polished to at least fifty percent and fermented slowly at low temperature, which is what produces the floral, fruity aromatics people associate with expensive sake. Junmai daiginjo means both at once.
Why more polishing is a trade, not an upgrade
Strip away the outer layers and you remove the compounds that give sake its savoury weight, its grip, its umami. What is left is cleaner, more aromatic, more delicate, more precise.
Whether that is what you want depends on the table. A very highly polished sake next to a plate of roast goose, or black bean spare ribs, or anything with soy and sugar in it, is simply overrun. The dish wins and the sake disappears. The same bottle next to sashimi, or a clear soup, or steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, is perfectly judged.
This matters more in Hong Kong than in Tokyo, because the sake here often ends up on a Cantonese table rather than a Japanese one, and Cantonese food covers a much wider range of intensity than a sushi counter does.
The brewery
Dassai, from a small mountain valley in Yamaguchi prefecture, made itself the best-known sake name outside Japan by doing something unusual: abandoning every category below junmai daiginjo. There is no cheap line here, no cooking-grade product, no table sake. Everything the brewery makes sits in the top classification, brewed year-round in a temperature-controlled building rather than only in winter.
The house style is consistent across the range: clean, aromatic, pear and melon rather than rice and earth, low in the heavier savoury notes. If you have decided you do not like sake because of something rough you were poured years ago, this is a fair place to test that opinion.
What we have
The range is a ladder with one variable, which makes it unusually easy to learn from. Everything sits in the Dassai collection, sorted by price with the lowest first.
Dassai 45, around two hundred and ten for a 72cl bottle, is the everyday one and the widest in style. Dassai 39, near two hundred and sixty, is the middle step: noticeably more aromatic, still with some weight behind it. Dassai 23, around five hundred, is the most polished and the most delicate, and it is the one that rewards a quiet table and a proper glass.
Two things sit outside that line. Sparkling 45, near one hundred and fifty for a 36cl bottle, is cloudy and lightly fizzy, fermented in the bottle, and a genuinely good aperitif. At the far end, Beyond, at around three thousand seven hundred, is the brewery's showpiece, made without stating a polishing ratio at all, which is itself a comment on the number.
There is also Dassai 23 in a 180cl bottle, close to a thousand, which works out cheaper per glass than the small format and is the right call for a large table.
What we would pick, and why
Dassai 45 is our first pick, and it is the cheapest bottle in the main line. It is the most useful sake in the range because it survives contact with food. On a Cantonese table with a few dishes going at once, it holds its shape, and served cold it does a job that white wine often struggles with.
The Sparkling 45 is our second, on grounds of pure usefulness. It is a better welcome drink than most cheap sparkling wine, the small bottle suits two people, and it is one of the few sakes that works before food rather than with it.
If you want to taste what the polishing actually does, buy 39 and 45 together and pour them side by side, cold, in wine glasses. The difference is obvious and it costs less than one bottle of 23.
Who should not buy the expensive one
If your sake is going on a table with roast meats, hotpot, anything braised in soy or anything with chilli, do not buy Dassai 23. It is not that it will taste bad. It is that you will not be able to find it. The delicacy you paid for is the first thing the food removes.
If you are buying for someone who has never drunk sake, start at 45 as well. Very fine sake asks the drinker to notice things, and a beginner has not yet built the reference points to notice them with.
And if the number itself is what you are buying, be honest about that. Beyond has no ratio on the label precisely because the brewery got tired of the number being read as a score. That is worth remembering the next time a smaller figure looks like a better wine.