The billowing sea of white stretching for miles proclaims a lush vitality in disjunction with the seemingly dusty landscape of the surrounding countryside. Eastward beyond this expanse of blooming almond trees rise the Sutter Buttes, a series of eroded volcanic lava domes jutting in isolation from the plains of the Sacramento Valley. And farther still, deep in the distance made shimmery by the spring heat, are the Sierra Nevada mountains whose snow melt feeds much of the region.
I pull off the highway and take an empty backroad along the groves, punctuated occasionally by a farmhouse and other agricultural buildings. At the head of each row of almond trees, apiculturists have placed white boxes from which bees swarm to pollinate the blossoms. Almonds are one of California’s most lucrative agricultural products, outpaced only by dairy and grapes according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s most recent report compiled in 2017.
It’s hard to believe that this northern California town, Arbuckle, population slightly more than 3000, could help enable a revolution in American sake. In all my years in the San Francisco Bay Area, about an hour and a half to the south by car, I had never heard of this town–and I’ve traveled these rural, northern counties many times. Arbuckle, however, is home to Valley Select Ingredients, a rice-processing company with deep ties to the region and a serious vision to supply milled sake rice to the burgeoning American sake industry.
Rice hovers just outside the top ten on most lists of California’s cash crops, yet this Sacramento Valley region is the second largest producer of rice in America after Arkansas. Despite the ascendency of almonds in recent years, and grapes (because of the wine industry) in the last few decades, this is also rice country, and has been for generations. Valley Select is majority-owned by the LaGrande family, a pioneer of rice farming in the region. According to history provided by the company, the family emigrated from France to North America via Montreal, and then moved to California, where it started farming in the 1850s. They began growing rice in this region in the 1920s, which is about the earliest that rice was grown commercially in California.
In the 2000s, patriarch Mike LaGrande decided that he wanted more control over the family’s finished project; rather than simply growing it, they would also process it. He embarked on a collaborative effort with other rice growers in the area to build a mill, and eventually spun off from the group to establish his own rice milling company with this son, Ken, called Sun Valley Rice. To avoid confusion, Valley Select is a separate entity which takes that milled rice and further processes it specifically for the sake industry.
I arrive at the headquarters, a relatively modern but small building that looks as if it could be a multi-unit dentist office as much as anything. The lobby has on display Sun Valley’s many varieties of consumer rice. I am soon greeted by Erin O’Donnell, the company’s Senior Sales Agent. According to her, the company is the largest miller of Japanese short-grained rice in America, processing strains including Koshihikari and Hitomebore. “We built the business around providing the highest quality rice to the consumers with the highest demand for it.” In other words, Japanese food consumers, of which there are millions (and growing) in the U.S.
The business was doing well but the company recognized another opportunity in the sake industry, convincing the LaGrandes to launch Valley Select in 2006 and install a sake rice milling machine in 2007. As readers of Sake Today probably know, there are several Japanese-owned, industrial sake brewery branches in the U.S., three of which we’ve featured in these pages: Takara (ST#4), Gekkeikan (ST#14), and Ôzeki (ST#17). There is a fourth that is slightly less visible, Yaegaki. In more recent years, SakeOne (ST#2; now aligned with Hakutsuru) launched in Oregon, and is by no means a small operation. The first four have been around for decades, providing a strong foundation for further sake growth in America. What Valley Select didn’t anticipate in 2007 was the nascent craft sake brewery movement here. There are roughly two-dozen small-scale sake breweries operating or in planning stages in America right now.
O’Donnell remarks, “When Valley Select was being established, we could see the sushi boom not only in America but throughout the world. When you have the sushi boom, sake is a close second in the increase in consumption. I can’t say that we necessarily anticipated the incredible growth, but we’re really excited to see and support it.”
Interestingly, O’Donnell reveals over lunch that her husband used to work for the company, but now works in the almond industry and travels to Japan as a part of his work. Anyone who has gone looking for sweets in Japan or is familiar with them has probably seen the ubiquitous chocolate-covered almond treats that many companies make. He is involved in that line of business, but during his time at Sun Valley he recognized the possibilities for working with the sake industry. He suggested the idea to the owners who agreed and installed the special milling machinery. It seems that the push for Sun Valley to pursue this new direction through the entity Valley Select was both internal and external.
Of course, you don’t just install a rice mill and go to work. Valley Select chose to install high-tech equipment from industry giant Satake Corporation, with whom the company maintains a close relationship for the purposes of training, maintenance and improvement.
“We take feedback from our customers continuously to see what we can do to make better sake rice,” says O’Donnell. “Is it reducing the flour on the rice? Is it milling it to lower polish levels? We work to modify our techniques to suit the needs of our clients.”
The company’s main buyers include most of America’s biggest producers (Takara, Gekkeikan and Yaegaki), but new opportunity came knocking about five years ago. Jake Myrick of Sequoia Sake in San Francisco (ST#6) visited them looking for a supplier, and Todd Bellomy of Dovetail Sake (ST#8) in the Boston area contacted them around the same time.
O’Donnell notes, “Working with them allowed us to be innovative; it reminded us of how we could improve our craft and in turn help them improve theirs. One of the great things about the sake industry now is working with these entrepreneurs. We supply them and they give us ideas. It’s a collaborative relationship.”
One of the ideas that sprung from these craft sake brewers as well as other partners was cultivating and milling Yamada Nishiki rice in America. Prior to this, the company had primarily focused on Calrose, that workhorse of a local rice strain used by all the big U.S. players (and most of the small ones as well).
“The sake industry was seeking to create more daiginjô sake for the U.S. and European market,” explains O’Donnell. “You need more varieties of rice to create great varieties of sake. We wanted to help the industry with something new. Yamada Nishiki, of course, has the highest name recognition and was the clear choice. It would be the ‘best first’ sake rice variety to do in California outside Calrose.”
When asked about how that got underway, O’Donnell responds, “It takes several years to cultivate a rice. We worked with the Rice Research Foundation to help begin the seed program. Once we had enough seed to grow a production-level plot, we contracted with a farmer in the LaGrande family to grow the Yamada Nishiki. The LaGrandes are very skilled farmers and practiced at growing high-quality Japanese short grain, like Koshihikari, which isn’t the easiest variety to grow. It was important to partner with the best farmers we knew for this project.”
Of course, growing the rice is just the first step. There is more to the process of supplying a new rice variety to an industry with high demand for it, which is the whole reason I’m visiting. We start our tour of the milling facilities.
The machinery is housed on the same grounds as the main offices. We step out the back of the building after passing by a small lab inside the company used for research and testing. A huge truck has pulled up and is dumping thousands of pounds of rice into what looks like an opened trap door. From there, it is carried into the processing facilities.
What many people probably don’t think about is that even consumer rice is processed and often milled. It’s not like farmers pick it and somebody just pops it out of the husks, like beans from a pod, making it ready to eat. I stand looking into a huge warehouse room where pipes dump rice powder on towering mounds. In the case of Yamada Nishiki, Sun Valley mills it to 90% (i.e. removes the outer 10%) before Valley Select takes over and further mills the rice through a more delicate process with different machinery to the needs of the sake brewer: 60%, 50% or even lower. Myrick had rice milled to 49% for a daiginjô in honor of the local San Francisco 49ers football team.
We go deeper into the facilities. After climbing some metal stairs we arrive at a second floor with a complex array of milling machinery in action. There’s a constant thrumming and driving rhythm, like we’re inside some kind of womb of the industrial world–anyone who has heard a pregnancy ultrasound at an obstetrician’s can imagine this. It’s a hyper-paced pulse both shocking and exciting. The highly computerized machinery, operated from a control room, removes impurities through sophisticated technology, including spectrum analysis, thus preparing the rice for the consumer. Or, in our case, the sake brewer’s specifications.
The Valley Select equipment used specifically for milling sake rice is smaller and located in a separate part of the facilities. A dedicated worker is assigned to it. The rice is then bagged for shipping. For domestic brewers, O’Donnell once again stresses the company’s commitment to supporting smaller brewers as well.
“One of the hardest things for these small businesses is buying a lot of rice at once, so we allow them to buy just 50lbs (about 23kg) if they want–that’s for our typical rice. That includes Calrose at 50, 60 or 70, and Yamada Nishiki at 50 or 60%. For anything special, they’d need to order more, but we are flexible and can work with them. Sun Valley also exports sushi rice all over the world and works with many distributors. If there is a sake brewery in London, Norway or Mexico (which there are), we can partner with a distributor that we already know to ship them sake rice.”
In America, Valley Select isn’t the only sake rice miller/supplier. Blake Richardson of “moto-i” (ST#3) owns a mill that offers its services to U.S. brewers, and the Iida Group also offers milled sake rice. But it seems clear that the bottleneck to this fledgling industry (and probably to other countries outside Japan with sake breweries) is sake rice supply. I’ve had one U.S. sake brewer, previously unaware of Valley Select, tell me, “If something happened to Blake, what would we do? We’d have one option left.” This brewer wasn’t suggesting the Iida option is a bad one by any means. The point was that not having choice and flexibility is bad for any business, much less an industry poised to surge. Valley Select fills a big need.
“We have a lot of passion for this industry,” says O’Donnell. “We are thrilled to grow along with it–as it grows, we grow. We see this time period as the beginning of something really big. We think this industry is going to continue to attract more and more consumers.”
I certainly hope so. Sake Today would be happy to grow along with it, too. And from what I’ve seen these past few years, the growth is real. I’m not sure the almond industry–or the grape industry, for that matter–will be stepping aside anytime soon. But there may be a new contender for California’s top ten agricultural products thanks to the domestic sake industry.
