Well alot has happened since I wrote last, the greatest surprise is that on the 14th I managed to get interviewed by a local tv station and now I'm going to be on the TV!! The other thing that happened was that there is a fever being passed around the brewers and I managed to catch it four days ago. Was down in bed all day but at least I got to take the day off haha. I also got to try this famous Japanese medicine, which was kinda cool. It had a horrendous stench to it, one that lingered around in the room for about an hour, and you could taste it after swollowing the thing for longer than that. I don't know if it really works or not but the other guys here were popping them like candy. Ugh but its all part of Japanese culture right?
So anyway the interview on the 14th went ok, I tried to speak Japanese as much as possible but my Japanese just didn't cut it sometimes so I had to resort to english. Fortunately the woman interviewing me had a basic understanding of english so between the two of us we could figure things out. It was kinda neat having a tv crew following me around for a day, they came really early in the morning, about 5:40 so that they could film all of us from the start of the day. I had one of those microphone packs stuck to my chest but it was light weight so no real hassle.
So the tv crew filmed my typical day at the brewery, starting at 6am after our morning talk of what is going to get done that day, we all file out into the main brewing area. My first job is to work in the Koji room with about three other people. The koji room is incredibly hot, about 80-90 degrees F so we all take our shirts off to do the work. The poor tv crew didnt take off their sweaters so it must have been very hot for them! The koji is this mold that converts the starches in rice to sugar so that later the yeast can have something to eat since rice contains no sugar within it. Rice cooked the day before gets innoculated with the koji mold and thrown into a box wrapped in electrical blankets to keep it warm. It stays like this overnight so that the koji can begin to grow. By the next day the rice in the box is all stuck together into one giant block of rice. So my morning job is to break apart the rice with a shovel, and using our hands, break down the block of rice into individual grains. This makes it easier for the koji to penetrate into the center of the rice kernal. After seperating the rice out the rice is then divided up into these smaller boxes to keep warm and to help dry out the rice, and the smaller boxes are stacked up on shelves located around the outside of the room. I'll probably make a seperate section in this website and explain this all more later. Anyway so we did all this and got videotaped,
After that was out of the koji room, into the freezing cold brewery and we started preperations for cooking the rice, and I had to go off and get breakfast for the workers ready, camera crew in tow haha.
After the steaming of the rice gets underway, it cooks for about an hour, so everyone breaks for breakfast, reads the newspaper, and generally I study.
Breakfast finished it's time to unload the rice. This part is incredibly crazy, and with the camera crew around it was even worse. Rice is shoveled out of the enormous rice cooker into baskets, which I carry out to the main floor. After dumping the rice out of the basket, the rice is spread out in large 6ft long boxes to cool. The cooling rice is then stacked up into piles to cool some more. We usually get 20-30 baskets of rice out of the rice cooker, each basket holds about 40 pounds of rice so that's alot of rice! If you've ever cooked rice, you should notice the amount of steam that it creates after it has been cooked, multiply that steam by 2000 and that is the amount of steam generated in our brewery. There is sooo much steam that you can't see 2 feet in front of you so everyone is yelling so that you know where everyone else is located. Mix in the camera crew trying to take shots while baskets are being thrown around, rice is being stacked, people yelling at each other and steam billowing up all around, you get the idea of what it was like.
Rice steamed, stacked, cooker cleaned, fans going full blast, we then open all the windows and doors so a strong wind can flow through the room, which helps cool the rice and also makes it really cold. At 10pm we all take a break.
After the break it was back into the fray, all of the now room temperature rice is thrown into the fermenters, and mashed down. After this I go out into the warehouse and measure out the next days rice. This is an extremely tedious, long, and cold job. The camera crew got the worst of it because they were just standing around and so they got cold much faster than me. The poor interviewer lady had to break out some of those hand warmer packs and jump around to keep warm haha. The measuring of the rice usually takes about an hour so after this we all left for lunch! Yay, I'll break here and continue on about a day at my job later. Bye!
To be continued...