The ever-recurring expression about the sake industry tells us that there are 10,000 schools of brewing. Large and small, we sake brewers may look like we’re doing the same thing, but no two breweries do things exactly the same when you look closely. You can find breweries where the propagation of koji mould is carried out completely automatically, but there are still lots of breweries making all the koji the old-fashioned way by hand. (Though in these lesser days, there are firms that buy in koji from outside, this is still very much the exception. Sake brewers, as a rule, consider buying in koji (as beer makers and (almost, but not quite all) Scotch whisky distillers buy in malt from outside suppliers), to be relinquishing control of the technical element which is the biggest key to style and character.
Making koji by hand inevitably involves a fair bit of work on the graveyard shift. Here at Tamagawa, I do most of the koji stuff myself, which means that, on most nights from autumn to spring, I get to drag myself out of my warm bed (okay, futon), and go and check on the culture room a couple of times.
Though it is less than a minutes’ walk (or shuffle, which is probably a better description of my zombie-like progress), I have to go outside to get into the main brewery building. As mentioned in previous posts, clear skies are only slightly less rare than blue moons in this area. On the rare clear nights, though, I am treated to a spectacular vista of what seem to be infinite numbers of bright stars. Looking up at Orion and Cassiopeia in the knowledge that they are visible all over the world (or at least the Northern Hemisphere) somehow takes the edge off the lone vigil.
Once in a while, I do get company to share the frosty night air. Fox the dog will sometimes meet me coming back from one of his nocturnal trips up the mountain.
Fox the dog
Fox eats persimmon
Fox and Cherie
Fox as seen from Orion
Fox is a pretty reserved character, so it is a low-key encounter: when he’s feeling effusive, he stops just long enough to sniff my hand.
On a number of occasions, I have startled off deer grazing on the slope by the pond; sometimes the surprise has been mutual. Once I scared off something which, to judge by the noise it made as it crashed through the undergrowth, was a lot heftier than a deer: a wild boar, I expect. Though there are occasional bear incidents in these parts, I am happy to say that I have yet to bump into one on the night shift. In the normal way of things, bears should all be hibernating while I am making sake. It sometimes seems that sake brewing is a kind of inverse hibernation - less sleep, rather than more.
A couple of nights ago, I heard a sound I have never heard before here at the brewery. It is quite common for me to hear the eerie cries of deer, but this was the much less unsettling cries of an owl. At the time, I was half-asleep so it didn’t really register, but, thinking about it now, there must have been more than one. They have perhaps come to stay as I have heard their hooting in the small hours several times since. Perhaps because the cries go back and forth companionably, I find them oddly cheering to hear in the dark. Being awake at odd hours can have its compensations.
