Well, yesterday was very sad. We were all watching the television during our lunch break when on the news it was announced that there was a helicopter crash in Nagano, and four people were killed. One of the people in the helicopter was the nice lady who interviewed me back in January, she was only 26 years old. Apparently they were giving a report on traffic conditions, and the heli was flying too low. They accidentally hit some telephone wires, clipping the propeller off, and crashed onto a rocky hill, just next to the highway they were filming. There was a large explosion, and it was a big mess. The police are not sure why they were flying so low or how the pilot, a 20 year veteran, could make such an easy mistake. Anyway so that was yesterday.
In happier news about two weeks ago there was a huuuuge party to celebrate the competion of our sake. Not really the completion, since we still had 12 more tanks of sake to press out, I really don't know why we had it on that specific date, but it was fun. The season came full circle as once again the Shinto priest came, and once again I had to do the tree branch offering, bow, clap twice, bow twice ceremony to thank the gods for a good sake brewing season. Then we all went to one of the resturants here and everyone at Masuichi was invited. People from our shop, the groundskeepers, all of the employees from the Club restaurant, and of course all of the brewers were there. 'Bout a hundred people in all, there was much food, and much drinking to be had. I learned that those tiny Japanese serving cups are forces to be reckoned with. It may be tiny but everyone was pouring everyone else drinks, and the sake flowed like a river. Every time someone would pour me a glass, I would have to quickly finish it because somebody else would be waiting to give me some more. Around certain people, like Sarah, lines would form. That day was also a young lady's 20th birthday (the legal drinking age in Japan), I felt real bad for her haha. The only way to escape the cycle of receving and drinking was to get up, grab a bottle, and start pouring for everyone around you until you felt like you were sober enough to sit down again and become a reciever. After the party there was an after party at the Heikkikan bar, where we drank lots of wine and whiskey. Of course after all of this drinking we still had to get up the next morning for work, 7:30am sharp. Haha the next day at work was definately not a good time.
As a sign of the end of the sake brewing some of our crew are going home. One of my co-workers, Takazawa-san, is an apple farmer the rest of the year, and he left to go back home last week to trim his apple trees. All 1,000 of them. By himself. Takazawa-san is a real superman, he is quiet, very nice, and incredibly strong. For half the season he was struggling with a cold but he would still throw around fermentation tanks, lift 45 pound bags of rice as if they were nothing, dip his hands in boiling water, mix the rice mash without his shirt on in below freezing temperatures, whatever needed to be done he could do.
In about 6 days my old roomate, Shinohara-san will be going back to his day job as a resturant worker at the company resturant, the Club. Its very sad seeing our team slowly being whittled down. I probably won't be seeing these guys again until next year. Our company is sending all of the brewery workers on three day vacation to an onsen in Shikkoku on April 4th, but unfortunately I can't go. My girl is comming to town on April 4th and although the trip would be free for me, if I bring her along then I would have to pay an extra 700 bucks for her ticket! Crazy. So maybe next year.
As for the brewery we started bottling!! Horray! The craziest thing about bottling here is that we don't have a bottling line. There is a machine with twirling brushes that spits water and stuff but you manually load it with bottles and it can only hold 2 at a time. Another thing about bottling is that we are going to be storing all of the 'upper level' sake in 1.8 liter bottles with flip top caps akin to 'Grolsh' beer. The bottles when they arrive from the warehouse do not come with the fip-tops on them, we have to attach them, or more specifically, I have to. The bottles arrived a while ago, and for the next day and a half it was me, 1,400 bottles, 1,400 bottle caps, a bucket of boiling water to warm my hands, and a crate with some cardboard stacked on top as a seat. All I can say is thank god I wasn't chosen as the guy who cleaned all the bottles. I put pics of this up in the gallery, and I must say, when I finished and gazed upon the rows upon rows of bottles, it filled me with pride to know that soon they would all be filled with the sake I helped make.
Then today I was asked to move the mountain of bottles to the room next door because they were getting in the way. Ugh my back still hurts, and all I could think about while I was moving them was that at some point I would have to fill them all, and then after that I would have to move the thousand, filled bottles to a refrigerated room. My spine quivers in anticipation.
Later.
To be continued...