Sake Factory Tour

Yesterday a group of us took a tour of a local sake factory, Tatsuriki. (Sake, as I'm sure you all know, is a Japanese alcoholic beverage made from rice. Japanese people often describe it to us foreigners as"rice wine", but it tastes more like a hard alcohol like vodka).

The first half hour of the tour consisted of a video in Japanese of how sake is made. (Check out the link about for details on how it's made because the only word I understood from the video was "yukuri" which means "slowly".) We watched men wearing nothing but a pair of shorts hefting the half-finished product around the factory, sampling it and spitting it back into the vat. Apparently the Japanese Health Department is a little more liberal than its counterpart in the US.

After the video, we all put on hair nets and rubber boots (apparently there are some regulations after all) and stepped into a solution of disinfectant before we entered the factory.
Here is some sort of machinery. One person was trying to translate for us - this has a computer...

This little shrine was on the 2nd floor of the factory. Sake is often used in Shinto ceremonies.

After the tour, we had samples of sake! We were told to bring snacks. We Americans and Australians decided that meant snacks, like peanuts, and chips, etc (Trisha brought a tangerine and banana!). However, all the Japanese people pulled out entire meals of raw fish and octopus dumplings, and who knows what else. We looked like the poor relations at the end of the table! We sampled six different kinds of sake. Kampai!!