If you just want to know what it is like to work in a brewery I can sum it up in two words. It's cold. Real cold. Or at the other extreme, really really hot but nothing really in the middle. Everything gets cleaned with boiling water and if you manage to get some on yourself (which is most of the time for me) the boiling water quickly turns to just above freezing water :) For the sake of the fermentation process the brewery is kept at a nice 1 degree celcius which is the primary reason why this is done during the winter. This is where you spend most of the time.
However every two hours or so you get to go into the koji room, which is where the brewers grow a special kind of fungus on the rice called koji. This room is a nice break from the cold of the brewery because it is kept at a toasty 35 degrees Celcius. The koji needs to be rotated and cared for, and this is actually alot of work so you sweat profusely. Of course when you finish you have to go back into the brewery, which once again, leaves you really really cold. Again a perfect environment to catch cold in.
Anyway I am getting ahead of myself, before all of this happened I used to work at Columbia University doing web design. Working at the University was cool and all, I got lots of vacation, the pay was good, and my co-workers rocked, but I just wasn't satisfied, the constant staring at a computer screen just hurt my eyes and fingers. So after about two years of pondering what to do with my web-skills and degree in Computer Animation and Design, I came to a logical conclusion that I am sure thousands of college graduates before me have decided to do with their 4 year, $120,000 degrees, chuck them out the window, run away and try and become a Sake Brewer.
to be continued...