Want to know your Junmai from your Ginjo? The Level 2 WSET course in sake is where it’s at
The Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) school on Bermondsey Street is well known for its wine courses, offering everything from beginner introductions to serious, internationally recognised professional qualifications.
Perhaps lesser known are its sake courses. The Level 3 Award launched in 2014, and more recently a Level 2 Award arrived in 2024. As with the wine qualifications, Level 2 hits the sweet spot: enough detail to satisfy enthusiastic amateurs and budding pros, without tipping over into the kind of depth reserved for career sake sommeliers.
You can take the course online if you need flexibility, but the best option is the intensive three-day classroom version, held at WSET’s Bermondsey base. Which is exactly where we found ourselves at 9am on a recent Monday morning, ready to get stuck in.
We’ve been interested in sake for a while now, along with other fermented rice drinks like Korean makgeolli and Thai sato. Having written about the rise of sake on London restaurant menus late last year, now felt like the right time to properly get to grips with it.
Much like wine, sake quickly reveals itself to be a complex subject once you scratch beneath the surface, but WSET does a great job of breaking it down into manageable chunks. Over the first two days, you’ll work through the bulk of the textbook, with the educator guiding you through the sake-making process step by step alongside, crucially, plenty of tasting.
Before long, you’ll have a solid grasp of rice polishing ratios, the different style categories, how koji is cultivated, which rice varieties are used, and how yeast influences flavour. You’ll even pick up a bit of Japanese kanji along the way.
It can get fairly technical at times, but it’s kept engaging with quick-fire quizzes and group exercises, so you’re not just sitting there taking notes.
Day three wraps things up with a couple more chapters, including practical advice on serving sake and pairing it with food, before the exam. Thankfully, it’s fairly gentle at this level: 50 multiple choice questions that you should be able to handle if you’ve been paying attention. Our results are still in the post, but we’re pretty sure we aced it.
We absolutely loved our time on the WSET sake course and would recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about sake – it’s pretty fascinating stuff. Just be warned, you’ll be itching to book a flight to Japan afterwards.
Key Information
Address | 39-45 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3XF
For more information | wsetschool.com
