Well at least there is plenty of hard physical labor to warm me up!! Everything in the brewery is being cleaned in preperation for the actual brewing. I am told that this will go on for a few weeks, until December 19th. By clean everything, I mean clean EVERYTHING, I have scrubbed the floors, the walls, ceilings, the undersides of tables, the insides of brewing tanks, whatever. If it is in the brewery or being brought into the brewery it gets scrubbed down with boiling water using brushes or these things called a "sasara" which is a bamboo whisk. Just earlier today one of my co-workers and I used the sasara to scrub clean about 120 wooden boxes which will be later used to cultivate the "koji" which is a fungus grown on sake rice to help with the brewing process. I managed to grow a decent size blister on my hand and I know my shoulders are going to hurt tomorrow. I probably should have gone to the gym more before coming here I think.
After the scrubbing, anything that would fit into our giant water boiler got tossed in for "sterilization". The heat is cranked up, steam erupts from the cauldren, and 5 minutes later, any bacteria that was lingering is incinerated. The water in the boiler gets so hot that when we pulled the wooden koji boxes from the water, the water evaporated and the boxes were dry in about 10 seconds.
I am usually wearing industral work gloves when scrubbing stuff but sometimes you have to take the gloves off to clean, because your bare hands are considered to be cleaner than the gloves. This means that my hands are being exposed to super hot water and freezing cold air for hours at at time. My poor hands are drying out and starting to look well worn, haha. I used to talk about wanting to have "Iron Chef" hands that I could plunge into boiling water, pick up hot pots and pans, and basically be indistructible. I guess I'm slowly earning those hands now!! In a couple months they should be made of stone. I never thought that I would need hand moisturizers as much as i do now. *P
To be continued...