I wrote this back in February, but was too busy and ragged to actually post. I haven’t changed the content, so some details are slightly out of step.
The fermentation room is where mashing and the main fermentation take place. For my first two seasons here, the yeast starter was also looked after in the same space. We then refurbished sections of the brewery, and now we make the orthodox modern style of yeast starter (moto) in a separate room built specially for that purpose. Old school moto - the Spontaneous Fermentation kind that we make without adding cultured yeast - is still made in this room, which is why there are still two name plates for this room.
This building is about a century old, but the Kinoshita family has been brewing here for 170 years. The original building is also still here, and is used for storing sake in.
On the beams and pillars of the structure, you can see this kind of wavy patterns on the wood. These patterns were made when the wood was worked with a pointed tool called yari-ganna in Japanese. It is a spear-shaped plane (yari is spear, kanna is plane), and it was used until the seventeenth century, when it was replaced by the modern Japanese plane (which is an interesting tool in itself. Japanese planes work by pulling rather than pushing, and carpenters here are always keen to tell you that they can throw off a translucent shaving only one molecule thick.) So, although our fermentation room was only erected a century or so ago, the timbers used had been working for the Kinoshita family for a great deal longer than that. Timber was a valuable resource for sake breweries, and sourcing it and preserving it for later generations was considered an important part of a brewery owner's work.
The walls of the building are wattle-and-daub, and about a foot thick. There is no refrigeration, but the temperature inside hasn't risen above six degrees Celsius since December, and is about two or three at the time of writing. The thick walls mean that, even if the outside temperature rises suddenly, the change inside is much more gradual, which makes life much easier for us brewers.
These are the fermentation vessels. Until the early twentieth century, sake brewing was carried out using wooden vats, but these were almost universally replaced by enamel tanks like you can see here. (There is a limit to how big you can make an enamel tank, so big breweries mostly use stainless steel tanks.) We have fourteen fermentation tanks.
The kurabito in the picture is busy with the pressing of Batch No. 30. When he is finished, this tank will be empty, but all the others are like this.
The apertures are sealed with a plug, which means there is fermenting sake inside. That’s right. We don’t have a single empty tank. Some of the fourteen tanks are already on their fourth cycle for this season. To be positive, you can say that we are making full and efficient use of the equipment: on the downside, this situation is a bit nerve-wracking for the brewery staff, and means a lot of headaches for me when I have to work out our very tight and complicated brewing schedule.
So, that was the fermentation room.
Postscript.
It’s now March, and we are mashing the last batch of the season. Since I wrote the above about a month ago, we have started about ten new batches, and pressed a similar number. And, guess what? We don’t have a single empty tank - again. If everything goes according to plan, we will press Batch Forty-three (Daiginjo) tomorrow, and we will have at last finished playing Musical Tanks. We have had full house in the fermentation room three times this season, which is a little hard on the nerves. But we are lucky to be able to brew so much sake, and we only get to do that because of our excellent customers. Thank you all - and keep up the good work.
The fermentation room is where mashing and the main fermentation take place. For my first two seasons here, the yeast starter was also looked after in the same space. We then refurbished sections of the brewery, and now we make the orthodox modern style of yeast starter (moto) in a separate room built specially for that purpose. Old school moto - the Spontaneous Fermentation kind that we make without adding cultured yeast - is still made in this room, which is why there are still two name plates for this room.
This building is about a century old, but the Kinoshita family has been brewing here for 170 years. The original building is also still here, and is used for storing sake in.
On the beams and pillars of the structure, you can see this kind of wavy patterns on the wood. These patterns were made when the wood was worked with a pointed tool called yari-ganna in Japanese. It is a spear-shaped plane (yari is spear, kanna is plane), and it was used until the seventeenth century, when it was replaced by the modern Japanese plane (which is an interesting tool in itself. Japanese planes work by pulling rather than pushing, and carpenters here are always keen to tell you that they can throw off a translucent shaving only one molecule thick.) So, although our fermentation room was only erected a century or so ago, the timbers used had been working for the Kinoshita family for a great deal longer than that. Timber was a valuable resource for sake breweries, and sourcing it and preserving it for later generations was considered an important part of a brewery owner's work.
The walls of the building are wattle-and-daub, and about a foot thick. There is no refrigeration, but the temperature inside hasn't risen above six degrees Celsius since December, and is about two or three at the time of writing. The thick walls mean that, even if the outside temperature rises suddenly, the change inside is much more gradual, which makes life much easier for us brewers.
These are the fermentation vessels. Until the early twentieth century, sake brewing was carried out using wooden vats, but these were almost universally replaced by enamel tanks like you can see here. (There is a limit to how big you can make an enamel tank, so big breweries mostly use stainless steel tanks.) We have fourteen fermentation tanks.
The kurabito in the picture is busy with the pressing of Batch No. 30. When he is finished, this tank will be empty, but all the others are like this.
The apertures are sealed with a plug, which means there is fermenting sake inside. That’s right. We don’t have a single empty tank. Some of the fourteen tanks are already on their fourth cycle for this season. To be positive, you can say that we are making full and efficient use of the equipment: on the downside, this situation is a bit nerve-wracking for the brewery staff, and means a lot of headaches for me when I have to work out our very tight and complicated brewing schedule.
So, that was the fermentation room.
Postscript.
It’s now March, and we are mashing the last batch of the season. Since I wrote the above about a month ago, we have started about ten new batches, and pressed a similar number. And, guess what? We don’t have a single empty tank - again. If everything goes according to plan, we will press Batch Forty-three (Daiginjo) tomorrow, and we will have at last finished playing Musical Tanks. We have had full house in the fermentation room three times this season, which is a little hard on the nerves. But we are lucky to be able to brew so much sake, and we only get to do that because of our excellent customers. Thank you all - and keep up the good work.
