Nighttime Noodling

I have been to no fewer than three sake breweries under school auspices now. The field trip today was to Ryozeki brewery in Yuzawa. It snowed the whole way there and I got to watch the countryside become more and more frosted as we drove. Midway through the drive there I realized that the bus was going very slow, and looking at the roads I thought for sure we would have to turn around. But no, apparently this was rather average winter driving conditions and our driver pressed on.

This was definitely the most educational trip to a brewery, the last one's main source of information was a video in Japanese about the process, and the first one was also mostly about the process but without really getting into the reasons for why things are done the way they are.
For instance, I learned that in the north of Japan, where it is naturally colder, the yeast from the koji grows more slowly because of the temperature and therefore fermentation takes longer and more of the rice is dissolved, making for a sweeter product. In the south fermentation takes only 15 days, it's usually around 25 up here, and the sake is dryer. According to the fellow giving the tour, his English was very good but I think he was nervous because he talked very quickly, the difference in flavors is well suited to the regional preferences. In the south lighter flavors and meals are nicely complimented by the dry sake, and in the north the preference for stronger flavors makes sweet sake more popular. Modern climate controls make it possible to produce either type of sake now, so Ryozeki produces dry sake to be sold in the south. Up here pickles are more popular and some are made with the rice cakes leftover after the sake is strained and pressed- they put either eggplant or ... he gave one other example but I seem to have forgotten it, but I have seen pickles made out of all kinds of things- anyway the item to be pickled is placed in the center of a rice cake and the leftover alcohol goes to work.

Another amusing tidbit is that when the governmental revenue service would come to do inspections, the president of the company would let the inspector "sample" the sake until he was fairly drunk, and then offer to let him go into the warehouse, maybe it was a grain storage area, to make sure they had made truthful reports, but the stair to reach it was too steep and narrow for someone who had been drinking. The president/owner of this brewery, like many of the other breweries in the north, was a major landowner. This worked out because a landowner would have large quantities of rice to sell, but if it couldn't all be sold it couldn't be let go to waste, so they made it into sake. In the south the owners of breweries were usually people who were in the shipping business, since for them the goal was to get the sake to Edo for sale, and they were the wealthiest and would have best access to rice because of their transportation.

These are all pictures from Monday, I think I had some good ones. The snow was melted yesterday by the rain, but today more fell, just not as much stuck. On the highway there are signs that tell the temperature and it was 0 degrees C at 4pm heading south and inland. They also have these barriers along the roads that have segmented metal screen things to stop snow from drifting onto the road, today I saw the screens being cranked up in preparation for winter.

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