Sato (pronounced roughly ‘sah-toe’) is a rice wine from Isan, the rural northeast region of Thailand. For generations it was part of everyday village life: cloudy, lightly sweet and gently fizzy, brewed at home from sticky rice in a clay jar and brought out for the rice harvest, for weddings, and for ordinations into monkhood.

People drank it together, sipping from a jar through long reed straws. A courtship ritual of the indigenous Phutai people sees a man and a woman drink the wine at the same time and try to outlast each other without breaking eye contact.

While Thailand is one of the biggest rice exporters in the world, for most of the last century it did far less commercially with its traditional rice wine than other rice cultivating societies like Japan, Korea and China. For most of its history, Thailand’s rice wine remained mostly in its rural settlements, partly because a state monopoly made brewing your own alcohol illegal from the 1950s until 2001. Villages continued making sato quietly and serving it at rituals and indigenous celebrations. It is only in the last few years that sato has been taken seriously by mainstream Thai consumers, and now it turns up cold, canned and sparkling.

The so-called ‘Thai sake’ fermented in a jar

If you have never come across sato (สาโท in Thai), the quickest description is Thailand’s version of sake. It is a useful comparison even if it’s not quite right, so hold that thought for a moment.

We start with the making of sato itself. Sato is made by fermenting cooked rice, usually sticky rice, into a mildly alcoholic drink. The result is cloudy to slightly hazy, usually a little sweet, and sometimes faintly fizzy. Most sato sits somewhere around 5 to 12 per cent alcohol by volume, roughly the strength of a light wine.

Several varieties of rice used for brewing (Source: Nanuanchun)

It is worth separating sato from a rice-based Thai liquor it often gets muddled with. Lao khao (เหล้าขาว), literally ‘white liquor’, is a clear, strong rice spirit that is distilled, and it is in fact made by distilling a fermented rice base very much like sato. So sato is closer to the raw material than to the finished spirit: distil sato and you are heading towards lao khao.

If you’re familiar with Japanese sake or Korean makgeolli production, you’ll know that rice-based alcoholic fermentation first requires a saccharification step – that is, the conversion of starch into fermentable sugars. How Thai sato deals with saccharification is the main differentiator of sato from sake and Korean makgeolli.

(Source: Baan Tepa Restaurant Bangkok)

Sato's solution is a small dried cake called luk paeng (ลูกแป้ง) – adjacent to Japanese koji or Korean nuruk. Luk paeng is made from rice flour, often with herbs and spices worked in, and it carries a living mixture of moulds, yeasts and bacteria. Crumble it over cooked rice, leave it in a jar, and three things get going in parallel. First, the moulds grow and release enzymes, mainly amylase, the same starch-splitting enzyme found in our own saliva, which breaks the rice starch down into simple sugars. Second, the yeasts feed on those sugars and produce alcohol, along with most of the fruity and floral aromas. Third, a population of lactic acid bacteria, the same broad family that sours yoghurt and sourdough, begins adding a tang of acidity.

Brewers call this parallel fermentation, and the principle is shared across Thai sato, Japanese sake and Korean makgeolli – but not with grape wine or beer. In beer, for instance, the sugar is made first, by malting and mashing barley, and only after that first step is complete is the liquid fermented into alcohol.

The mix of microbes in luk paeng is broad, and it varies from cake to cake. Studies of Thai starters have found moulds such as Rhizopus, Mucor, Amylomyces and Aspergillus doing the saccharifying; yeasts including Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the workhorse of bread, beer and wine; and lactic acid bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Pediococcus driving the sourness. Because no two starter cakes carry exactly the same community of organisms, traditional sato is naturally variable.

Sticky rice, also known as glutinous rice, is the usual choice. It is high in a starch called amylopectin, which breaks down readily into sugar to yield a sweeter, fuller drink than ordinary rice would. White sticky rice gives a pale sato; black or purple sticky rice gives a reddish or pink one.

(Source: Nanuanchun)

Fermentation traditionally happens over several weeks in earthenware jars, and Thailand's warm weather helps the process along slightly, but also makes the drink prone to turning sour since the acid-producing bacteria proliferate in warmer temperatures.

While the process appears very similar to sake-brewing, there are key differences. The Japanese sake making process tends to be much more controlled. Koji – the sake starter – is made with rice inoculated with a single type of mould, Aspergillus oryzae, and usually a pure strain of yeast is later added.

(Source: Nanuanchun)

Sato’s luk paeng, by contrast, contains a whole community of organisms at once rather than one chosen mould or one chosen yeast strain. The rice is unpolished and warm fermentation is used, which is why it often comes out cloudier and a little sour. Nuruk, which is used in Korean makgeolli making, would appear much more similar to luk paeng, although nuruk is usually based on wheat rather than rice flour.

Brewed for the harvest, the wedding and the temple

In the rice-farming northeast sato was tied to the calendar of work and worship that shaped village life. Isan custom follows a twelve-month round of communal merit-making known as Heet Sip Song, “the twelve traditions”, with a set observance for each month, and several of those months turn on rice: the planting, the first grain, the harvest, and the giving of rice to the temple. One of the best known is Bun Khun Lan, the harvest merit-making, when a village gathers at the temple or out by the paddy to heap up the freshly threshed grain, have it blessed by monks, and give a share to the monastery in thanks for the crop. Households brewed sato to go alongside gatherings like these.

And because sato needs several weeks to ferment, brewing it was an exercise in planning. Nanuanchun, a present-day producer working from his grandparents' recipe, has described families counting backwards several weeks from a wedding or an ordination so the jar would be at its best by the time the guests arrived. There is also no shortage of occasions to brew for – one example is Bun Bang Fai, the “rocket festival” held just before the rains, when villages build and fire large home-made rockets into the sky to ask for a good monsoon.

Traditionally, the harvest ran on an exchange of labour rather than wages. Neighbours came to help you cut and thresh your rice, and you fed and served them drinks for their trouble; the following week you might head over and do the same on their land. The rice a household grew would often become the sato that thanked the hands that helped harvest the rice.

Rooted in agricultural cycles and Buddhist teachings, the Heet Sip Song refers to the twelve traditional monthly merit-making festivals practiced by the Isaan people in Northeast Thailand and Laos. 

The serving was communal. Often, a single large jar was opened for everyone, and drinkers gathered round to draw from it together through long reeds. Among the Phutai people the jar is refilled as it empties: as guests pull wine up through the reeds, water is topped back in, so one jar keeps giving until the flavour finally runs thin. Elders and honoured guests take the first draw, then the younger people.

Among the Kuy people of Ban Ku village it was poured as a sacred offering to the gods and used in the klae mo, a musical healing ceremony. A home-made jar of rice wine could be a welcome for guests, a thank-you for harvest labour, an offering to the spirits, and part of a rite meant to make a sick person well, sometimes all within the same season.

(Source: Nopparat Kingkaew, Bangkok Post)

How sato became forgotten

For all that, sato spent most of the twentieth century pushed to the edges of Thai drinking, and the reason was in large part the law. In 1950 the government passed the Liquor Act and set about turning alcohol into a licensed, factory-based business run largely for the state. Through the 1950s and 1960s the state took over alcohol-production and made brewing at home without a licence technically an offence. Part of the official reasoning was due to methanol risk: unlicensed lao khao, the distilled rice spirit, was sometimes made in a way that could leave dangerous levels of methanol in the drink. The state presented its monopoly as a matter of safety as well as tax revenue.

The impact on sato was direct. Legal alcohol gathered into the hands of a few large companies. For a home brewer or a village sato maker, the path to going legal was out of reach: a licensed factory-scale operation needed a registered company with millions of baht in capital, which almost no one in a rural community could raise.

Under that arrangement sato became a nearly forgotten rough drink of the countryside, something only the older generation remembered making at home. Nattachai Ungsriwong, known as Ob, who now runs the craft producer Devanom, said that when he started out, senior figures in the drinks trade told him flatly, “you can't use the name sato, it won't work”. Sato had a widespread association with unsafe home-brew. Another craft sato founder, Keng-Songpon Pharupon of Nanuanchun, has also shared in an interview that sato was looked down upon as a drink of the rural farming class.

The rules loosened briefly at the turn of the millennium. From 2001 the government allowed villagers to make traditional drinks again, and in 2003 the Thaksin Shinawatra government folded local liquor into the OTOP scheme (“One Tambon One Product”, a tambon being something like a locality), so that each tambon could sell something of its own. Sato slowly became a commercial product for the first time in decades, although it did not immediately go well. Licences remained very hard to get, quality control was thin, and the drink was still seen as a cheap souvenir from the countryside. And because brewing experience was limited, some bottles even exploded. Amateur brewers did not realise that a young, sweet, unfiltered sato would keep fermenting once it is sealed.

Sato’s crafty comeback 

For a long time after that, not much changed. What eventually helped sato reemerge was craft beer culture. From around 2012 a small homebrewing scene grew up around Bangkok, much of it centred on Chit Beer, a brewing school and bar on the river island of Ko Kret north of Bangkok. That scene trained a generation of craft beer enthusiasts and brewers in yeast handling, temperature control and clean fermentation, the very things village sato had never had. Before long, some of these newly-empowered craft brewers would turn the same tools on rice.

(Source: Brian Spencer, CNN)

The rules were slowly being prised open in stages. Small craft producers could begin operating but were limited. The licences on offer capped a maker by the size of the machinery and the number of staff, so you could be legal but only ever small. A 2022 regulation finally dropped the old requirement for millions of baht in registered capital and sorted producers into small and medium tiers by equipment size, which allowed breweries to move up to larger, temperature-controlled operations. The Community Liquor Act, in force from June 2025, went further, clearing away most of what was left and barring officials from writing licence rules that favoured the big companies. Advertising is still tightly restricted, but between them these changes turned sato from something made around the edges of the law into something a craft maker could build an operational business on.

At Noi Samrub Bar, you may order sato by the bottle or glass (Source: World's 50 Best)

By around 2021 in Bangkok's fine-dining rooms, a small group of innovative chefs and sommeliers started putting sato in front of city diners who had known it only as a rural country drink. One of the first restaurants to take it seriously was Samrub Samrub Thai, run by the chef Prin Polsuk and Thanyaporn Jarukittikun, known as Mint. Mint has described the change as part of a larger shift back to Thai cooking and beverage. In 2025 the pair opened Noi Samrub Bar, a looser spin-off that pours sato on draught.

Sommeliers in Thailand grew confident enough to advocate for sato as a drink of place, and pushed to pair it with Thai food rather than always defaulting to European wine. Against a Thai meal, it felt only right that there was an option for a Thai rice wine alongside European offerings.

Songpon Pharupon who founded Nanuanchun Sato.

A new kind of craft producer emerged, and they did not all approach sato the same way. The heritage makers build the story out of the land. Pharupon of Nanuanchun was a Bangkok-trained architect who went back to his family's rice fields in Kalasin, in Isan, and makes sato from his own glutinous rice. One of his bottles took a silver medal at Sake Week Thailand in 2025, judged by a panel from Thailand and Japan.

A sato making demo by Nanuanchun. 

Further north, outside Chiang Mai, a tiny outfit called Native Liquors, run by Tawin and Yumatida Lanyos (known as Berm and Pew), makes a sato from a recipe Berm learned from his father, along with flower- and tea-infused versions. He looks to preserve the knowhow handed down from the grandparents.

A second group builds the business around the village economy. Paadtho, in Roi Et, works from a family recipe about a century old, buys its paddy from local farmers through community mills, and presents its sato as a product of the whole community.

(Source: Baan Tepa Restaurant Bangkok)

Even the incumbent has moved: ThaiBev, which controls most of the Thai spirits market, now sells a canned sato called ZATO. Underneath all of this are the village and OTOP producers who never stopped making sato through the years it had no prestige. They are the foundation the craft sato revival is built on.

Devanom, based just outside Bangkok, came straight out of that modern craft-beer scene, and more than anyone it has treated sato as a drink to be perfected, bottled and paired with food. It is also the sato that we would be tasting for ourselves.

How Devanom got to sato through beer, hops and mead

Devanom (เทพนม) sells the argument that sato can be made clean, consistent and food-friendly enough to sit next to wine and sake. It is the work of two brothers, Nattachai Ungsriwong, who goes by Ob, and Teerapat Ungsriwong, known as Art. Before they made anything alcoholic they sold their mobile-software company for a small fortune to a large Thai telecom. The name “Devanom” comes from the Thai gesture of pressing the palms together in a “wai”, the everyday sign of greeting and respect. Ob has said the idea is that a drinker is wished happiness as if receiving a blessing. The brewery is in Pak Kret, just north of Bangkok.

Their route into brewing began with craft beer. Ob and Art learned to brew at Chit Beer, the school and bar on the island of Ko Kret, in its first cohort in 2014. Devanom went commercial as a beer brand around 2016, and its Devanom IPA built a reputation as the best IPA in Thailand. We have told that side of the story in full in our profile of Ob, Art and their beer.

Beer was a commercial dead end under Thai law all the same. Small brewers could not legally bottle it and sell it around the country; they could only serve it on the premises of a brewpub. So the brothers used a different licence. Under a fermented-liquor permit, held through a separate company called Nonthaburi Brewing Company, they started making mead, a honey wine that could be bottled and distributed nationwide. Devanom made theirs from Thai longan and lychee-blossom honey. It had one drawback: Thai drinkers did not think of mead as a Thai product.

(Source: Gerard Alexis, Omunomu)

Around 2020, Devanom began exploring sato brewing, since no drink reads as more Thai than sato. Ob studied the production in sato houses in the northern provinces, and Japanese sake, and came away convinced that sato’s flavour could be improved to a consistent level and turned into something you could drink through a meal, the way sake is. The first sato took about a year and a half to develop.

A 2022 revision to the law let Devanom upgrade its equipment step by step to a fifty-horsepower operation with temperature-controlled tanks. Sato had been about five per cent of what Devanom sold; by the time sake sommelier Alex, who runs the Omunomu Craft Sake Bar in Singapore, profiled the brewery in 2026, Devanom was making about five to six thousand litres of sato a month, with new tanks on the way to roughly triple that, and said sato had begun to overtake both its beer and its mead.

How Devanom makes sato

Earlier we met luk paeng, the traditional starter cake that carries a whole wild mix of moulds, yeasts and bacteria. In Thailand’s heat and humidity the wild bacteria in luk paeng, especially the lactic-acid ones, make sato hard to keep consistent, so different batches can come out with quite different levels of alcohol and acidity.

Devanom’s change is to stop using the whole cake. It isolates the starch-converting mould Amylomyces rouxii, grows it as a pure culture, and adds its own isolated strains of yeasts separately. Devanom also leaves the souring bacteria out, controls the temperature and does not add sugar, so the sweetness comes only from the rice.

Nattachai “Ob” Ungsriwong, co-founder of Devanom Brewery (Source: Gerard Alexis, Omunomu)

While sake’s mould, Aspergillus oryzae, brings more of a savoury depth that sake is known for, Devanom prefers Amylomyces rouxii as it suits the warm conditions sato is made in. Beyond the starter, the rest is careful modern brewing: named single rices, temperature-controlled tanks, a gentle sake-style press and months of cold maturation, all done in a spotless, glass-walled room. For the full step-by-step, read Alex’s fascinating feature on Devanom’s sato-making here!

Besides beer and mead, Devanom makes a wide range of sato: premium still bottles at about 13% ABV, single-rice bottlings (Kiaw Ngoo, Jasmine or Luem Pua), and sparkling satos canned like craft beer.

Devanom’s Craft Sato expression is from the sparkling sato series, and is made from sticky Kiaw Ngoo rice, has no sugar added, naturally sparkles, is left unfiltered so it pours cloudy, and comes in at 6% ABV. It is the entry point to the range, as it comes in softer than the brewery’s still bottles. Let’s give this a taste.

P.s.: To discover craft sake and more brews such as this, do check out Alex's Omunomu Craft Sake & Raw Bar in Singapore!

Rice Wine Review: Devanom Craft Sato (Sparkling Sato series) 6% ABV

Tasting Notes

Appearance: Cloudy and pale, Calpis-looking, with a faint sparkle in it.

Nose: Rich, all rice at first, opening with warm glutinous rice just lifted off the heat. It turns sweeter and floral, somewhere between rose, frangipani and rice mochi while coconut milk and sago run under everything. There is a dense, chewy sweetness, steamed Nonya banana-leaf dumplings, with an aromatic green thread of pandan running through it. Brown sugar with a malty edge and vanilla sponge cake.

Palate: On the palate it drinks a little like a cross between a Piña colada and coconut daiquiri. It’s clean but very layered, full and round in flavour. Opening with malty sweetness and coconut water, a run of lychee, ripe peaches and slightly tangy passionfruit. There’s a slight prickle from the fizz. Lots to love about the texture here too as it coats the mouth with more of that coconut-pandan profile promised on the nose with a continued sweet, slightly zesty backbone, like a spiked Calpis.

Finish: Clean and medium length. It’s fragrant and still evolves quite a bit. Sweet pandan, the coconut dries out, moving from creamy coconut milk to coconut flakes.

My Thoughts

I haven’t had such a simple and unqualified verdict in a while: I loved it in every way. For a 6% ABV drink presented like a can of craft beer, this is a very accessible gateway into the sato category but also packs in a lot of layers: the sticky-rice sweetness, coconut in two or three forms, the fruit, the light tang and the faint fizz, and a finish that pulls back from sweet to dry coconut flakes. It gives you all of that complexity without much effort on your palate and it goes down very easily.

This is one of the tastiest new things I have put in a glass this year.

@CharsiuCharlie