"In order for grain to ferment, a distiller first has to convert its starch into sugar. In the European tradition, that is typically done by letting the grains germinate just enough to create an enzyme that will start the conversion, a step called malting.
"Japanese producers achieve the same end by inoculating their grains — usually rice — with koji mold, which works faster and more efficiently than malting. Yeast cells then eat the sugar and release alcohol as a byproduct. Very roughly speaking, the result is sake; if it is then distilled, you get shochu.
Note:
(a) "Malting is the process of steeping, germinating and drying [and heating] grain to convert it into malt [which is the name of product]. * * * [by drying and heating] the malt producer stops this stage of the process when the required enzymes are optimal. Among other things, the enzymes [mainly amylases] convert starch to sugars such as maltose * * * " en.wikipedia.org for malting. You may, but do not have to read the same for malt.
(i) Malting may be applied to various grains, but mostly to barley. In the latter, malting uses intact (unhulled) barley.
(ii) Said to be lower in amylase production during germination (despite lack of research reports on this topic), hulless barley -- see barley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barley
(section 4 \Taxonomy and varieties, section 4.2 Hulless barley) --
is not used for malting. (The English adjective hulless may have two Ls or three, the latter appearing in FreeDictionary.com.)
Various species within the genus, each for a purpose, are called 日本麹黴 (pronunciation in Japan: nihon kōji kabi).
(i) The kōji is Japanese pronunciation for kanji 麹. The kabi is Japanese pronunciation of kanji 黴, meaning mold.
(ii) "発酵技術 * * * 発酵食品に使われる本ページで言及する広義の意味での麹の技術は中国に由来すると考えられているが、中国と朝鮮が長い間に伝統的な酒造りや醤造りに使用していたカビはクモノスカビ (Rhizopus) やケカビ (Mucor) の一種であり、しばしば狭義の「麹」として言及されるニホンコウジカビ (A. oryzae) とショウユコウジカビ (A. sojae) ではない。ニホンコウジカビとショウユコウジカビは、日本人が見出して伝統的に発酵食品に使用していた麹で、現在は東アジアでも広く使用されている。" ja.wikipedia.org for 麹.
my rough translation: Fermentation, as well as 麹 in broad sense, came from China. Yet the mold used in China and Korea to make wine and soy sauce is in genus Rhizopus or Mucor -- NOt the 麹 in the narrow sense used in Japan: Aspergillus oryzae (for wine) and A sojae (to make soy sauce)/ These two molds are what Japanese discovered 見出だす, and presently broadly used in East Asia.
(iii) In Japan, koji is applied to HULLED rice, to generate maltose or glucose (the same goal as malting) for yeast to consume during fermentation.
(c) Comparing malting and koji, in order to generate maltose or glucose so that yeast can utilize, is underway, so I will not go into it.
About the assertion that koji is more efficient has the root in the basic observation, to be discussed next.
Introduction: Germination is utilized in malting, which is a food processing technique where the cereal grain is steeped (immersed in water and drained in cycles), germinated for several days, and dried by kilning. The main side-stream product of the process is the sprout, which consists mainly of rootlets and to a lesser extent the acrospires, which are removed from the dried kernel when the rootlet has clearly appeared (Fig. 1). Malt is most widely used in the brewing of beer and whisky, where the malt undergoes several additional processing steps, including, eg, mashing, where the malted grains are heated in water, resulting in a hot water extract (wort) and the discarded pellet (spent grain). Barley is by far the most common raw material for malt, although wheat, oats, and rye are also malted in a large industrial scale.
• npi: "Nature Partner Journals, a series of [online only] open-access journals published by Springer Nature": from the Web.
• More often used in brewery, acrospire https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acrospire
(pronunciation)
is the same as coleoptile used in botany. See Martin P et al, New Markets for a Changing Environment; Methods used within the project for malting small grain quantities. Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme/ Northern Cereals, December 2016 (report) https://cereal.interreg-npa.eu/s ... A-Cereals-DT413.pdf
("Underneath the husk [same as hull] of the grain, the coleoptile (or acrospire, which encloses the first leaf) starts to grow and the malt is usually ready when this is about the same length as the grain, but before it [coleoptile] emerges")
See Note (d)(i)(C) below for coleoptile.
• mash (vt; etymology: "13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a"):
"1a: to reduce to a soft pulpy state by beating or pressure pas in mashed potato]
b: crush, smash <mash a finger>
2: to subject (a substance, such as crushed malt) to the action of water with heating and stirring in preparing wort" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mash
(i)
(A) "Botanists use the number of cotyledons present as one characteristic to classify the flowering plants (angiosperms): species with one cotyledon are called monocotyledonous ('monocots'); plants with two embryonic leaves are termed dicotyledonous ('dicots')." en.wikipedia.org for cotyledon.
(B) For monocots, however, it is confusing because cotyledon refers to various things. This is apparent when one searches images.google.com with (monocot cotyledon). This (confusion) is because this is true -- in monocot, cotyledon refers to various things. See
John W Chandler, Cotyledon Organogenesis. Journal of Experimental Botany, 59: 2917 (2008; review) https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/59/11/2917/608661
("With respect to homology between monocot and dicot cotyledons, there is debate as to whether the scutellum or coleoptile represents the monocot cotyledon. The grass scutellum and dicot cotyledon are functionally equivalent in being reserve lipid and protein storage organs, but to what extent the grass scutellum represents the whole cotyledon, part of it or an alternative structure is open (Vernoud et al, 2005). The coleoptile protects the plumule during germination and has also been considered by some to be equivalent to the cotyledon or part of it (Satoh et al, 1999). This debate is also related to whether the coleoptile is part of the scutellum, the first leaf, or a novel organ (reviewed in Vernoud et al, 2005) and is influenced by the observation that the development of the scutellum and coleoptile are genetically distinct (Satoh et al., 1999) ")
(C) What you need to know is that when a grain germinates, at one end there will be rootlets (academically: radicle), emerging also at that end the shoot pointing upwards (coleoptile as a hollow sheath protecting the first leaf).
coleoptile (n) https://www.collinsdictionary.co ... /english/coleoptile
(pronunciation)
, whose etymology, according to Wiktionary, is: "Ancient Greek [noun masculine] κολεός ([romanization:] koleós, '[sword] sheath') + Ancient Greek [noun neuter] πτῐ́λον (ptĭ́lon) [a feather]."
(ii)
(A) Found in endosperm of a grain is mostly starch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starch
(illustration caption: "Structure of the amylopectin molecule")
Disregard amylopectin. Starch is a polymer made up of a single monomer (glucose) in a long chain that is occasionally branched.
endosperm (n; from Ancient Greek [preposition] endon within + [(noun neuter) σπέρμα (romanization: spérma) seed] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/endoaperm
(B) amylase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amylase
(section 1 Classification: three forms, whose end products are either maltose (glucose dimer) or glucose monomer)
hydrolyzes starch.
(iii) The "discarded pellet (spent grain)" mentioned in Introduction of (d).
View the figure: During malting, most endosperm is untouched by enzymes (amylases). Still, the spent grain is discarded. (but this article in (d) sought to make use of it).
(A) The Swaen is a malthouse (which makes malt) based in Village of Kloosterzande, the Netherlands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kloosterzande
The "swaen" is Middle Dutch (not Modern Dutch) for English noun swan.
(B) SBI shanghai is a branch of Selected Brew Ingredients (SBI), a distributor of malt based in Town of Veghel, the Netherlands.
To sum up, van Rooijen works for SBI which sources malt from The Swaen (among others).