Have you wondered what it’s like to brew sake in Japan? Well, sake brewer Andrew Russell has all the details. He also includes some tips on following in his unorthodox footsteps.
Part one of our extensive interview shares the story of how Andrew got into sake brewing. Check that out if you missed it.
This transcription has been edited for clarity.
Daily and Seasonal Routines at a Sake Brewery
ME: So, you know, you gave everybody a little snapshot of like how difficult it could be at a brewery. Do you want to talk about your daily routine in a brewery?
ANDREW: Because it’s the night before a day of work and it’s already going through my mind – you kinda have to preplan the day, the day before, so you know what to do. Because once you get into the brewery, there’s not really much time to do much.
We’re still not in top gear yet. We just started brewing, but as of tomorrow, that’s gonna change. Right now we have three yeast starters, and one of them is graduating to its biggest tank, its final tank.
There are so many ways you can brew sake. You know, it depends who you speak to, which is the best way. And everyone’s got a best method. I think it really depends on the brewer. But we’ve got a very early start tomorrow cause we’re kind of making things hard on ourselves to benefit the sake.
Our first job tomorrow is moving a tank of sake that is in its odori stage right now or, the dance, as we call it. We’re moving that into a full-size tank. Now some brewers, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but some brewers from a moto stage, the yeast starter goes to a very, very small tank.
What they’ll do is when that moto is ready to get sandan shikomi, or three-stage mashing, they’ll put it directly into a large tank. And it has odori in that large tank. And there’s actually a technical term called supon jikomi, which means you just move it directly in.
But these large tanks with a very small amount of liquid mean that the yeast starter cools down and you can’t really temperature control it. And it’s a very, very formative stage in its life when you do that. So what we do instead is each batch of sake goes to three different tanks.
So from a moto tank, it goes into a medium-sized tank. And we can wheel that thing around to cooler parts of the brewery. It’s in a tank appropriate to its size, so we can control its temperature. And bear in mind we’re doing mostly ginjo production.
And then we don’t allow it to dance. So we’re very strict. Our toji always says “odori sasenai.” So we don’t let our moromi dance. We put them into a bigger tank. And then the day that we mash it, we move it into the larger tank. And it’s actually very physical work. We do it all by hand so we can avoid pumps. So we started at half five (AM) tomorrow, and that is the first job of the day.
And we’re right up against the clock on that one, because we already start the boiler for the steamed rice. So the boiler will start at about six o’clock. Imada-san our toji will start that. And we’ll have already started work. This is going to take about an hour at 5:30. So at 6:30, we’ll hopefully be just finishing that job, because bear in mind, the steamed rice is going in that tank. So there’s no room for error on any of this all has to fall into place.
Then the other staff will start turning up towards seven and that’s what they call mushi agari. So that’s when we’ll start mashing. So we’ve got koji tomorrow to make. We’ve got to mash this tank, so it’s going to be, there’s soe, odori, naka, and tome. We’re at naka stage tomorrow.
And then we have to prepare the Yabuta. Because we haven’t built it all up yet. It all gets packed away in the summer. Now that we’ve reached the stage where we have moromi, we’re probably about three weeks away from pressing because it isn’t ginjo we’re making. So maybe in three or four weeks, we have to start building up the Yabuta. And that will be our day tomorrow.
So it’s a busy one.
ME: I imagined that (Yabuta) would just stay in place somewhere in the brewery and didn’t wouldn’t think it would be disassembled and reassembled and all that.
ANDREW: Yeah, you have to build up a brewery every year. You have to dismantle as much as you can, tools get put away, of which there are thousands of components, obviously.
But the Yabuta, the large accordion press, that’s a big one. So, it’s not a particularly complicated machine, but there’s a lot of parts to it. And it has to be immaculate. You have to wash every bag the moromi is going into because once sake gets to that pressing stage, it’s really a battle to get any kind of outside odors away from it, because it really kind of shows up in the final sake. So the first press each year is always very hard work.
But it varies from day to day. So that’s just tomorrow.
ME: So yeah, it will kind of progress as the season goes along. Or at least as you’re progressing from these entry-level grades to higher-level grades.
You want to get into that a little bit because it’s kind of a dynamic season, right? You start off doing some things and maybe you hit your flow and you repeat a lot of those tasks over the course of the season. But I’m sure a lot of that changes, as well.
So what’s kind of the season for a sake brewer? Or, I mean, traditionally you’re kicking things off around October, and when are you wrapping things up, and what’s that flow look like for you?
Andy: Yeah. So as I said at the moment, we’re just starting to reach top gear. We started brewing if you consider the first steaming the start of the brewing season. I don’t, I consider the prep because the prep is a lot of hard work. As I said, the brewery has to be put back together, and every single component needs to be cleaned.
You have to jet wash floors, you have to wipe the walls. You have to clean every little component of machinery. You have to strip and restrip things down again. All tanks have to get cleaned. So I always associate the start of the season as one of the toughest times because your body’s kind of still not used to it.
You kind of get a bit lethargic in the summer. And then all of a sudden you’re back, your body’s getting twisted into bad positions and things inside machinery. So that’s the first stage. Right now where we’re starting to build up a head of steam, as I say, we’ll have our first moromi or real tank of sake tomorrow.
The next stage after that is you start obviously building up these tanks of sake. And when it really starts getting tough is when you start pressing. As I said, that’s a big job in itself. And because the Yabuta, I keep saying Yabuta for people that don’t know what that is, it’s the manufacturer who makes the vast majority of the pressing machines in a brewery.
Once that stage starts happening, there’s a lot of work that gets done behind the scenes that people tend not to take much interest in but actually can be the most tiring. So bottling, pasteurization, you know these types of things.
At Fukucho, we have a very specific production technique, or style I suppose: what we’ve pressed almost immediately is put into bottles. And that’s difficult to do in the season because it takes a long time. But the reason we do that is our toji very much believes in keeping freshness. So the idea is to lock in that freshness, and when you’re doing things in bottles, typically it’s very gentle on the liquid inside. So when you do pasteurization, we do 100% pasteurization in the bottle. It’s a very time-consuming way to do it, but we think it’s the best way to do it. So that’s why we do it. But yeah, that’s another significant point in the brewery: bottling and pasteurization.
Where it starts getting difficult for me, and most brewers agree, is in February. February is considered one of the hardest months. And there’s a very, very good reason for that. You’re too far away from the finish line to kind of get excited. But you’ve already been brewing at that point for several months. And it’s grim, it’s freezing cold. It’s the coldest time in Japan.
It’s dark as well. You know, you’re getting up in the pitch black, going to work, freezing cold, and then you come home, and it’s already dark. And you’re exhausted because you’ve been doing this brutal schedule. I mean, by this point, I’ve maybe had three days off.
There are no weekends. Weekends and weekdays mean nothing. And so you may be lucky if you’ve had three days off, maybe once a month. And you get a couple of days off at New Year if you’re lucky. So yeah, that’s the grim point for me. I hate February.
But then March kicks in and you can start to go, okay, one more month and we’ll start finishing mashing, shikomi.
Once you finished mashing, there’s still a ton of work to do. But it just eases the pressure because you don’t have that constant thing that you have to do first thing in the morning: washing rice, steaming rice, getting it all put together, making koji, doing all the cleaning up that’s associated with that.
What you’re doing at that point is managing the tanks that are still active. And you’re starting to think about maybe packing up the koji room. You can start to do that quite early. You’re bottling, of course, frantically bottling and pasteurizing. But there’s no new stuff being made, there’s just the stuff that is in the tank. So you can start to count down the tanks.
Then you get to April. And the idea for virtually everyone is to try and get finished before the Golden Week, the Japanese holiday, which is, depending on the year, the last few days in April or the beginning of May.
And that’s when you just sort of go: right, okay. They actually call it kaizo. It’s the point where all tanks are pressed and bottled. It just means you’re kind of counting your eggs for the season. And you can start to say you’ve done another year.
Truth is you’ve still got a lot of packing up to do, and that’s all it is. So yeah, that’s basically a typical season.
ME: I get knots in my stomach hearing about that, to be honest with you. It sounds like it can be kind of daunting. You’re pretty much doing this labor of love. Full-time. I mean, you miss family and it would be hard to have a dog. So you give up a lot to do this very, very cool thing. I can imagine it is very tough.
Motivation
But obviously, you think it’s rewarding and it’s worth it. I mean, what keeps you going? Do you have a thing that keeps you going every day? Something inside you that’s like this is what you’re meant to be doing at least at this moment in time?
ANDREW: Yeah. There are three things that keep me motivated. One of which is obviously, or should be very obvious to everyone: sake is not for everyone. I get that. But, to me personally, and to a lot of people that I’m surrounded by, it’s just a fascinating thing.
There seem to be no definitives in it. I mean, it’s a lifetime of learning. One of the things I don’t like is when people identify themselves as sake experts. I meet a lot of extremely, experienced people. And the one thing they all have in common is they never say they’re experts. It’s almost the way you can identify when someone isn’t an expert is when they say they are. Because the more you know about it, the more you realize you don’t understand this thing.
So that motivation to, the fact that I honestly don’t think in my lifetime, I’m ever going to get to a point where I say: “that’s it, I figured this all out. I know exactly what I’m doing. I get it. I can just stop now.” I honestly don’t think that’ll ever happen. It’s just so complicated.
And you can go down so many different rabbit holes with it. So that’s the obvious one.
In terms of actual work, there’s a very, very brief moment when we press a batch of sake, there’s a kind of ritual. And I noticed the, they did it vigorously at my first brewery. But I noticed that they didn’t at my new brewery. I kind of reinstated it. And actually they seem to kind of get into it now. At some breweries, you’re going to get very, very strict pecking order. And I made, I learned a valuable lesson in my second season. When they press a batch of sake, they quickly go and get one of these large kikichoko, a 180 ml ceramic vessel.
And they fill it up with sake that’s just pressed. You cannot get any fresher. But there’s a bit of a ritual with that. What you’re supposed to do with that, it doesn’t matter who takes the sake – you know, takes it from the tank. But you absolutely should give that to the toji, the person who made it. And they should try it first. And then it should go to the next person. Typically that person will be the kashira. That means the head of the brewery, and these are very influential people. And then they would go to the next in line, and so on and so on.
And I made a very big mistake in my first brewery. I gave it to the toji and there was no one else around and he handed it back. And just as I was drinking it, the kashira walked in and saw this. And it’s safe to say he didn’t speak to me for about two weeks after that. That’s how seriously they take it.
But when I came to Fukucho, they didn’t do this and I actually really go into it. So I take a cup every single time now because I’m on the shibori team, the pressing team, and I fill that cup and I go find Imada-san and I give her that cup. And she gives us her verdict on the sake that she’s made. And then I go to the next person, and then I’m usually third in line anyway. So I take a drink. And that moment is fantastic. It only lasts about 20 minutes, but there’s a real sense of accomplishment that you’ve done something. There’s a tangible part of the brewing season that’s just been completed.
And of course, within minutes afterward, you’re back doing something else and you kind of forget about it. But that is a nice moment as a sake brewer.
The last is job satisfaction. When I worked at BMW, I joined at the same time as this man named Keith Duncan. Great man. He was extremely supportive throughout my career. But he was at a lower level than he finished off, and so was I. And we kind of went up through the ranks together. To the point where he’s now a director of the company. He was always highly motivated, always optimistic. It was his job to gear up the staff. And the last time I got to go back to the UK, obviously haven’t been back in a while because of obvious (COVID) reasons. I went to my old company and I saw him and, you know, we kind of caught up with each other. And I said, “so how’s work, how’re things? Are you still enjoying yourself?”
And he said, “well, you know, the more I do this job, I’ve come to realize that it’s futile what we do.”
Well, that really kind of surprised me. I felt that there was something unsatisfying about the job, which is why I left. I could never work at what it was.
He said, “it’s funny what we do. We bend over backward for customers. We work hard every day. You know, we get paid well, but at the end of the day, if this company was gone tomorrow, no one would care.” And as I thought about that, and as I was thinking, he said, “it’s true. If this company was gone tomorrow, people would pull up to our car park and you’d see that place is closed now. And they would just pick up the phone and Google the next available BMW. There’s one, five miles away. And they would go to that dealership. It would be a minor inconvenience, but no one would care.”
At Fukucho, I genuinely believe, and my last brewery too, if that company, for whatever reason was gone tomorrow, people would care. People genuinely care, it would have an impact locally. It would have an impact. You know, the people that are kind enough to sell our sake, it would have an impact overseas with people that are kind enough to promote our sake.
And all these people that have been working for years to build up the brand–it would affect people. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’m not saying that. But people will say, oh, you know, I miss that sake. And that is the difference between the job I’m in now and the job I was doing before. And it kind of means something to a lot of people. So it’s motivation to do a good job, to not let the company down. And it kind of hopefully motivates everyone in the right direction every year, to try and make as little mistakes as possible, and try and work as hard as we can to make a good product.
You know people are expecting us to do that.
ME: The industry is facing a lot of challenges, which we’ll get into later. I think it’s very well said. It’s true, people would miss the (Fukucho) brewery. I mean, locally, regionally, and maybe even people who haven’t tried it before.
You know, I haven’t had Karuizawa whisky, the distillery is shuttered, and what a disappointment. And there are all these amazing malt distilleries in Scotland, for example, or in Ireland too, where that industry had this massive retraction. It’s a different product, obviously, and I don’t think as challenging to make. But certainly, there are parallels with this craft and something that people cared quite a bit about that really drove local economies and people all over the world would yearn for these things.
And when they’re gone, you can still feel the void of it. You’ve got fewer and fewer companies producing more and more of the same. And so you definitely lose something when any of these breweries closes, which is kind of a sad fact of the industry.
I don’t know how long it goes back, but certainly, if anybody listening doesn’t know, the sake industry has lost many, many breweries. And this will probably continue to happen, though some of the statistics I’ve seen lately, it’s kind of leveling off a little bit. There’s a lot of demand on export market and maybe a resurgence of sake. Domestically too. And we’ll get into that later. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
I guess one last thing in the life of a sake brewer: it’s pretty unique that you’re a westerner brewing at a super traditional brewery in Japan.
Becoming a Sake Brewer in Japan
Do you have any advice for anyone that wants to get into sake?
ANDREW: Yeah, I would recommend it to anyone that is willing to make the sacrifices because to me, it’s a fantastic job. I’m so glad that I did it. Do I think it’s for everyone? No. I know people and I think that person would just, this is not for them. I know their lifestyle. But I do think it’s a fantastic job if you’re sensible with yourself, if you’re honest with yourself. Can I really make these kind of commitments to say goodbye to friends and family for half a year, every year, and work yourself to the bone. That’s what you do every year.
Am I willing to do that for the rewards that, hopefully, I’ve made it obvious that is a very, very satisfying job. You have to be realistic about money. And you have to be realistic about, you know, you can’t just go in, I mean, I went in with very little Japanese skill if I’m being honest. But I knew that it was something I would have to do if I was to continue. Anyone can go in for a year and sort of get by. But you get to the second year you’re kind of just being a nuisance to other people if you don’t start trying to communicate with them.
So if you’re committed to not just brewing, but learning the language, probably making a few exceptions on your own cultural preferences as well, to kind of blend them, then yeah, I would say, go for it. It’s a fantastic experience. I’ve met so many cool people. The brewing community is a very fun community.
People are very, very friendly, well, not everyone. But most people are very, very friendly and supportive, as well. A lot of people get surprised at how uncompetitive it is, normally people are offering to help you or give you advice. So if you think that you can put yourself through all the negatives, there’s a whole host of positives from choosing that career as well.
So, my advice is to go for it. If you think you can deal with that, then yes, definitely.
ME: I guess kind of transitioning into the industry and where we’re at today, do you think that more and more breweries would be receptive to foreigners to Westerners, who are committed, they’re passionate to joining their breweries?
ANDREW: Absolutely. My first brewery was, was a culture shock for the staff more than it was for me. They told me, I think three of them told me, I was the first foreigner they had ever met. And I couldn’t believe this.
I mean, you know, this is not 34 years ago. But this is a small town. Many of them hadn’t traveled extensively. And when they say met, they probably meant speak to. I’m sure they’ve seen another foreigner, I find that part hard to believe. But to have met and spoken to them, this was the first time. So there is that kind of cultural thing that you have to get used to, and that that can be challenging to say the least.
But that gets washed away once you start communicating better. And as I said, the onus is definitely on you, whether or not you’re a success or not. You may get some bad examples, but if you put in the work and you show them that you’re learning Japanese, willing to work, willing to bite your lip a few times with cultural differences and you think you’ve been aggrieved.
If you do all that, I think people will be susceptible to, it is sometimes a little hard to get in the front door. But once you’re there, it’s really up to you to prove to them you’re capable of leading this lifestyle.
And I think manpower a big issue for sake breweries. And going forward having foreigners that can not only brew for them in the winter, but possibly support them in exporting in the summer when they’re quiet, I think it’s a real big advantage to a lot of breweries. Not all of them, some of them may be interested in export, and that’s fine. But to have that, to fill a gap that they maybe can’t fill with local people anymore and to have someone that can communicate with a broader market, there’s definitely a role for foreigners.
I’ve had some bad experiences as a foreigner because I’m a foreigner. I won’t go into what they are. But for the most part, people have been very, very kind to me in this industry. So, I wouldn’t be worried about discrimination or something like that. The truth is you’re going to hear discriminatory things. It’s just a fact, some people will say things that you get annoyed about because you’re foreign. But in general, most people have been extremely kind to me. So yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that.
ME: Awesome. Yeah, that’s really cool. I mean, it’s something that I’d always thought about. There are some opportunities (to brew in Japan) and maybe I’ll put that into the description or into the blog post. But, you know, there are a few breweries that sort of host you and show you a little bit about the sake brewing process. Maybe give you a little foot in the door too. I’ll share some links to that, with anybody that’s interested, as well.