I had my first real foriegn foodie experience here in Japan last week! Everyone knows that here in Japan people eat raw fish and squid, it is really no big deal. I personally love the stuff and have always said that I am willing to try anything once. Well last week my philosophy was put to the test, well kind of anyway. I had taken the 4th of March off way back when and during my brief holiday I took the train into Nagano. I found this small farmers market like store there and came across a bottle labled "Hachi No Ko" I knew that "No Ko" ment children of but had no idea what the "Hatchi" could be. I asked what it was but all I understood of the resulting conversation was that "it tastes good" and "eat it over rice" so whatever I bought a jar of it, took it home and the next day tried it out. It's delicious stuff, kinda crunchy and sweet. So last week I popped open the jar and began spooning it over my rice as usual when I noticed something different. I saw what I thought was a pair of fly wings in my "Hatchi No Ko". Upon further inspection i saw that the wings were part of a completely intact bee!!! Well whatever I scooped the bee carcass out with my chopsticks figuring it was some kinda mistake and threw the thing out. But then I wondered and looked closer at my bowl of rice and noticed that there were dismembered bee body parts strewn all over the place! Looking at my jar of "Hatchi No Ko" I saw that the whole thing was chock full of bees all mashed up together hahahaha! Later I found out that "Hatchi No Ko" means "The children of bees". Well whatever bee babies are delicious. I had considered sneaking some into my girlfriends rice while she was here but I never got the chance haha.
Back in the brewery, a few weeks ago I was told that we did not have enough bottles for all of the sake we produced this past winter and that we were all going to head out on a short "field trip" to pick up some more bottles. We were joined by 4 other workers and everyone split up into 4 trucks and headed off to the bottle manufacturing plant. When I say "trucks" I don't mean normal Toyota kinda trucks. We took the big trucks, you know, the kind with cranes built into the back. Upon arriving at the plant we filled these trucks to the brim with crates of 1.8liter bottles, 3,000 in all. We hauled them all back to the brewery and just barely managed to squeeze them all in with the original 2,000 or so bottles. Of course someone would have to clean our new bottles but before we could start on that the filling of our old bottles began.
This part was pretty cool, we had one person move bottles to the filling station. The brew master would then fill the bottles with a gravity machine hooked up to a large vat of sake while someone else took the filled bottles, capped them and then passed them on to the pasteruization station. Our pasteurizer was just a small cauldren of water into which we could fit 7cases of sake at a time. The cauldren was then heated very slowly by a wood fire to a temperature of 71 degrees C. Pasteurization complete the bottles would then be moved into storage. The sweet port like sake and the cloudy sake were sent to the fridge becuase they are inherently less stable due to residual sugar, while everything else got shipped off to our warehouse. Moving bottles into the fridge was the biggest pain in the ass. The first floor of our fridge was all filled up, and since there is no staircase in our refridgerator, I had to lift every case of sake up over my head and pass it on to the person on the 2nd floor (yes our fridge is 2 stories tall). This was incredibly tiring, it was like lifting weights at the gym, only these weights were awkward, fragile, and I had to do 50 reps as fast as possible because my co-workers thought it was funny to pass me cases as quickly as they could.
Our sake babies safely storage we then turned to the fun task of cleaning up the next 3,000 bottles. I cleaned about 2,000 or so but never saw the end of this process because I left for a week-long well deserved trip with my girlfriend on the 2nd in addition to the company sponsored, 3 day trip to Shikoku in Southern Japan.
Which reminds me, the day before I left on vacation I noticed that the Master Brewer here had brought in a box of empty water bottles and had proceded to clean them out. He then wandered around the brewery filling them all with various kinds of sake, mostly the expensive ones. Then the day of our 3-day brewer's trip he came up to me and thrust two full water bottles at me and told me that they were for the bus ride haha. Everybody received two water bottles full of sake, there were 9 people so that was a total of 18 bottles of sake for three days. Ahh that was a good trip, and thank god for the sake because I found out that on Japanese bus tours it is customary for the tour guide to talk the WHOLE time that you are on the bus. Hours and ours of babbling, but armed with two bottles of sake in hand, it's all good.
Today I started working at the brewery again. All the bottles have been filled and the other younger brewer has now left to go back to work at our shop. There are now only three brewers left in our group. Today I started labeling, as there isn't too much to do anymore. It's only a matter of time before I will leave too, Sarah told me my last day would be on the 20th of this month, but really with so little work left, my last day of sake making could come sooner. Laterz...
To be continued...