Junmai is your pure sake. By pure I mean that no additional starches or sugars are added and no additional alcohol is added either. For junmai, 30% of the rice kernel gets milled/polished away and the sake has a full rich body with acidity higher than average for a sake.

Honjozo is pretty similar to junmai except that a small amount of additional alcohol is added to lighten up and smooth out the flavor of the sake. This also makes it a bit more fragrant. Like junmai, the rice must have a degree of milling of at least 70%.

Ginjo sake is much more light and complex than the previous two because the rice has been polished further. For ginjo sake, 40% of the kernel gets milled away. This combined with the addition of special yeast, lower fermentation temperatures, and fancy sake techniques make ginjo sake one of the most fragrant available.

What could be more fragrant than ginjo sake? Daiginjo sake. The rice gets milled even further, somewhere between 50-65% being milled away. There are a wide variety of daiginjo sakes, but most are like ginjos, just more full bodied and fragrant.

Namazake or “nama sake” is sake that’s not been pasteurized. Therefore it should be stored cold. This sake has a fresh and lively taste to it and all types of the above sake can be namazake as long as they aren’t pasteurized. There’s also nigori sake which is coarsely filtered sake. The unfermented portion of the rice is left in the bottle which gives the sake a cloudy white color due to the bits of rice floating around inside.