Well the brewing season is over for me. My last week was spent preparing for golden week, which is a week long holiday that just about every business person gets off, resulting in an enormous amount of tourists floating around Japan. I am told that here it gets really crazy so we started preparing for golden week by pre-packaging several hundred bottles of Square one.
Buying a bottle of sake here isn't like buying a bottle of wine at your local shop, here we make sure you know you are getting something 'special'. I actually think it's pretty ridiculous how much packaging we put into a single bottle of this stuff. First I had to label the thing and put the seal at the top of the bottle, then the bottle is given a cardboard cushion for tis base, the bottle and base are then placed into a cardboard box with extra padding on the sides to protect the bottle, then this box is placed into another box with really pretty packaging, and a small booklet is sealed inside with the bottle as well explaining the history and why this sake is so special. Actually I am not really surprised that all this packaging goes into a bottle here in Japan, this past winter I walked down to the 7-11 one day and bought one of those small boxes of take-home doughnut holes. Upon opening the box I discovered that the doughnut holes were individually wrapped!!!! Crazy! Sarah said that Japanese customers won't buy anything that is not individually wrapped but I think I would draw the line at doughnut holes. It was only a box of 10 doughnuts and after finishing the thing for breakfast I managed to accumulate a small mountain of plastic wrappers.
Anyway as I said brewing is completely over, I have started working on building Masuichi a good webpage which should be up iin the next three weeks or so if everything goes ok. Also none of the brewers come in anymore, not even the Sake Master, they have all disappeared until next winter. It's really sad, I already miss the smells of the brewery and my daily exercise. I will update this webpage if anything fun or exciting happens at Masuichi while I am here, but I think writing about my days programming in front of a computer would probably be a boring read since most of you do that anyway, and it's the same here as anywhere else. Here's to looking forward to next winter! (never thought I would ever say that haha)
Sean
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