So the 14th of Feburary has come and gone which marks the official end of cooking the sake rice!!! This may not sound like much, and in fact there is still another 2 months of work ahead but for us here at the brewery it's the light at the end of the tunnel. What this means is that there is no more Koji rice to look over and care for, plus we dont need to measure, wash, and cook the rice every day. Thus everybody can go home now and I can sleep in!! yay!! By sleep in I mean I get to sleep until almost 7am. Also the work day is from 8am until 5pm now, tho we will still be working 7 days a week. This may not sound like much but for me its like a vacation. Sooooo nice, today was the first day since December that I could sleep in past 5:30. Ahhhhhh.
To mark the end of the rice cooking we made a special batch of mochi with a half a pound of rice which we threw on top of the giant rice cooker. This time we didn't use mallets tho to mash the mochi rice up. Instead we used our hands, which was incredibly hard because the rice was HOT!!! Also once again there was a video crew hovering around, so we had to do this all formally with our happi coats and stuff. Tho of course once the camera crew had gone our Master Brewer, the 77 year old man, rolled his piece of mochi up into a giant dildo and began pointing it at people, I guess some people never grow old eh? It was really amusing and I wish I had had my camera but the batteries were dead! Oh well, I think that the mochi penis is still lying around in the brewery somewhere, we can't remember where we put it after processing the batch of rice and cleaning everything up.
So the next phase of sake brewing is...... da da da More cleaning!!! I spent the whole day cleaning out the used wooden koji boxes with my old roomate, I think we went through 300 in all. Basically we have gone full circle now and I am starting to do the same stuff that I did back in early December. But pretty soon we will start pressing the rest of the sake, then bottling will begin so that should be pretty cool! So until next time!
To be continued...