For this period work starts at 8am every day and finishes up at 5pm, so it is pretty easy in the beginning. We also get to take frequent breaks, there are two short half an hour breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, plus a one hour lunch break. This is pretty necessary since working in the brewery is killer on your body. Plus its really really cold in there so these are your chances to warm up.
Since we have 7 people working here everything gets cleaned simultaneously. The koji room (the room where a type of fungus is innoculated on the rice, more on this later) is swept and then wiped down with hot water. It is extremely important to get this room as clean as possible but since the whole room is constructed of wood no chemicals are used for fear of unwanted flavors or smells getting sucked into the floors or walls. You gotta get down on your hands and knees with a bucket of really hot water and a cloth and wipe every nook and cranny of the room clean. The other rooms in the brewery, the brewing areas and the cleaning room are simply washed down by a high power spray using an antibacterial soap and water.
All of the brewing tanks have to be cleaned as well. If the tanks are metal it is a simple matter of spraying them down with water and soap. But here we also use wooden fermentation barrels which are a much larger pain in the ass to clean. These barrels are about 6 feet tall with a diameter of 5 feet. They have to be dragged out of dry storage (a precaution to prevent the mold and bacterial infection in the barrel) and rolled into the brewery. Then each barrel has to be filled to the brim with boiling water, covered, and left for three days so that the wood can bloat up and become purified. When the barrels are first filled they leak tremendously but as the wood soaks up the hot water the wooden slates fatten up and the barrel seals itself tight.
Next all of the pumps, tubs, tubes, washing cloths, koji containers, the rice cooker parts, burlap rice bags are cleaned and all holes or broken bits are patched up. With the exception of washing down the tanks and the floor nothing in the brewery is sterilized with antibacterial soap or chemicals. Everything else is cleansed by boiling water. This makes sure that no foreign elements are introduced to the sake. For those who know a bit about wine or cider making not even Sulfer-dioxide (a basic winery cleaning agent) is used. Ever.
While cleaning the rice also periodically arrives. It comes in large trucks usually in batches of 200 30kg (about 60 pound) bags. This is a big event as everyone comes out to help move the bags off of the trucks and into our warehouse. Moving 200 bags of rice is not easy! Even the Sake Master who is 77 years old comes out to help, he hoists those bags like they weighed nothing and merrily carries them in.
At the end of the basic cleaning period (which in and of itself is exausting) the real work begins.
Next step...