Have you ever wanted to become a sake brewer? If so, you’re in the right place.
Learn the story of Andrew Russell. He took an unorthodox path from a BMW salesman in the UK to brewing sake at an iconic kura. Andrew explains how his passion developed, how he landed his first brewing job, and the rigors of sake brewing.
This transcription has been edited for clarity.
BRAD: Andrew, let’s just dive right into it. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?
ANDREW: Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me on Brad. I’m a big fan of your website and blog. So it’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Andrew Russell.
I’m a sake brewer, or as they call kurabito, in a little town called Akitsu, which is a rural town in Hiroshima with historic significance to the sake industry. I’m literally this last couple of weeks started my third season at Imada Shuzo Honten (maker of Fukucho). Before that, I was at the neighboring prefecture Okayama at a brewery called Juhachi Zakari where I also did three seasons before making the move here.
So that’s the brief history of sake brewing. But I also do a bit of writing about sake, as well. And just in general, a fan of Japan’s fantastic national beverage.
BRAD: Pretty cool. Do you want to share how you got into sake? Cause it seems like just from reading your bio on Origin Sake, that maybe you found like a love of Japanese culture or Japan first, and then you kind of discovered sake after the fact. Do you want to elaborate on that and the origin story of you and sake?
Origin of a Sake Brewer
ANDREW: Sure. I mean, it’s quite long because people ask me this a lot and I can have two versions. The long one and the short one. If you don’t mind I’ll give you the long one.
First and foremost, a lot of people talk about this kind of eureka moment with sake where they try one and they fall in love with it instantly. And being honest, that never happened to me. But I’ve had sort of, you know, two or three occasions, significant occasions in my life where now that I look back on them, they were kind of forks in the road. But I didn’t see that at that point.
Going way back, I did a completely different job before I go into sake brewing. I was a salesman for BMW and did that for 12 years. I did it straight out of high school.
The German system, if anyone knows much about the German system, at the time doesn’t really favor university degrees. They favor training themselves. And I got the opportunity to join a franchise, a very prestigious franchise in my local town in Edinburgh (Scotland). Or go to university. And I was determined to join this company.
So I did that for 12 years and I kind of burned out. I think if I’m being honest after quite stressful years. And me and a girlfriend at the time said, why don’t we take a year out?
Basically at that time, as a Brit, you could go to three places on a working holiday visa very, very easily. And it was like Canada and Australia, and they were both English-speaking countries. Or you could go to Japan.
So the obvious choice was to go to Japan. So I went back with all intention of rejoining my company. My job was open to me. I ended up going back while I was a student. But I fell in love with the culture, and I fell in love maybe a bit with being away from work for so long, as well.
And when I got back, I decided that I’m going to enter university and kill two birds with one stone. So what I did was, I enrolled in university, and I joined the Japanese program. And you got to do a year studying abroad in Japan. So my first year there, they decided they were doing a thing called innovative learning week. Now, what happens is, classes are suspended and you do something that’s relevant to your department.
So me being part of the Japanese department and me being a mature student, obviously, everyone in the class was doing things like anime or, you know, a manga fair, or something along those lines.
And I didn’t really want any part of that. The students had nicknamed it innovative drinking week. Because basically, you’re off class for a whole week. So everyone just went to the pubs and things. So I thought, well, why not kill two birds with one stone and organized a sake tasting.
And I knew absolutely nothing about sake. Hand on heart, nothing. And I didn’t think I would get it passed. You know, I’m asking teachers to give me money so I can get the students drunk. And to my surprise, they said, yeah, go for it. But it has to be a proper event. It can’t just be, we give you money for sake.
So I say frantically learning about kikisake and sake tastings and stuff. And I somehow managed to put this event together, but I really didn’t know (anything), I was completely being a charlatan about the whole thing. Anyway, the event happened and all the teachers took part in it, as well.
So the next day I was worried, I didn’t know how the event went. And I bumped into one of the teachers, a woman from Kochi. And if you knew anything about people from Kochi, they’re famously heavy drinkers. And she said she absolutely loved the event. You absolutely have to do that next year.
So that kind of ramped up the pressure. This became an annual thing at the university. So that was my kind of push to start studying about sake. And the more I studied, the more I realized this is just fascinating. And that was when I had the idea to write my dissertation. So I guess that’s one of the forks in the road that I was mentioning, but I still didn’t really have any kind of great affinity with the product.
That changed when I did my year abroad. I got taken to an event by a friend of mine called a chidori ashiki. Now, chidori ashi in Japanese means like, ”stumbling while you’re drunk”. So that was literally the name of the event.
And all of the little izakayas, you know, small little drinking establishments, would pair up with a sake brewery in Okayama. And you’d pay a small fee and get a drink and get something to eat. And I went to this event and the first place we went to, the sake that they were serving just blew my mind. It was incredible.
Now I know with the benefit of hindsight and how it was made, they were making it with a very modern yeast called ichi hachi maru ichi, or 1801. It’s a very modern yeast. My sort of very beginner palette and those kinds of yeast (ME: super fragrant, floral), basically kind of the exact opposite of what a lot of people are expecting a beverage made from rice tastes like. And so this kind of blew me away. But as it turned out, that was Juhachi Zakari.
And that was my first brewery. And I didn’t know at the time, I was speaking to the owner. I didn’t know at the time I was on a path to joining this company.
So when I graduated. I came back to Japan to work for another company in Kyoto, which was horrific. I hated it. It was a Japanese corporate lifestyle. It was all ties and shaved and all the rest of it. And it just completely didn’t suit my lifestyle. So after about a month and a half of doing this awful job, I phoned up the same friend that had introduced me to the chidori ashi event. And I said, look, you’ve got to help me. I need to get out of here.
And he said, well what about sake brewing? And as it turned out, the week before I just started writing Origin Sake. I think it was just a Twitter post or something. But I walked into a bar in Kyoto and still had no idea what I was doing with ordering things off the menu. And the kind man behind the bar could recognize this.
And he said, well, where are you from? I said I’m from the UK. And he said, don’t worry, I’ve got a sake just for you. So he put this glass in front of me. And he said, just try that. And it was Tamagawa’s spontaneous fermentation. The red label yamahai.
It really spoke to me. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I tried a lot of daiginjo, very aromatic ginjo, and stuff like that, but I never tried anything like that before.
It was like discovering a completely different beverage. And that was my motivation for starting Origin. And as it turned out, because two things kind of converged that I, I really started to ramp up my interest in sake and I decided I was quitting my job. So when I phoned them, my friend said, well, why don’t you just start brewing?
I was like, sure. So he phones me, and I was expecting not to get any kind of quick feedback. But he phoned me back the next day and said, look, Andy, there are two places that are looking for someone. One is going to be very sales orientated. They want a foreigner to do sales. One is brewing and I said, well, forget the sales one.
Let’s go for the brewing one. It was Juhachi Zakari. So I ended up with me and my friend who’s Japanese. He literally went to the job interview with me because my Japanese was too poor at the time. And he begged the shacho (company president) to give me a job. And yeah, I think it was the first time they’ve ever employed a foreigner.
So they were very, very reluctant. Um, but they gave me the job, and that was it. That kind of set on my path for sake.
Sorry, that’s a long story, but that’s the full kind of layer-by-layer breakdown of it.
Brewing Sake is Hard
BRAD: So did you know at that point, like how brutal this job was going to be or how challenging it was going to be to brew sake?
ANDREW: Well, everyone told me that it was going to be tough, but it was usually people that had never done it. So you never really know. You have to kind of take it with a pinch of salt. You know, people hear that it’s tough. But my first season I actually joined midway through the brewing season, because I had to leave my job.
I think maybe what happened is my company had started with a certain amount of brewers and realized that we’re not getting the job done. So we need an extra pair of hands. So I ended up going in halfway through the brewing season and I was just so amazed. I’d been reading about processes from books and seeing YouTube videos and you know, that kind of thing.
And then all of a sudden here I was in a brewery, you know, in a koji muro; standing next to a tank of yeast starter and things. So my first season was actually one of my most enjoyable, I didn’t find it hard. I know people find that hard to believe, but the only thing that I really struggled with was the cold, because I wasn’t prepared for how cold it is in a brewery.
Like people say, you know, Japan’s pretty cold. But that’s mostly when you’re walking outside the house with the jackets on, and then you maybe jump in your car and you’ve got a heater, and then you go to the shop and there’s another heater.
And when you spend the day, you know, first thing in the morning, till late at night, inside a room with a whole building with absolutely zero heaters by design, because it’s bad for everything when there are heaters and things. Then that’s when you knew what cold feels like, chills your whole body, it goes right to your bones, as they say.
BRAD: It’s not like you’re lounging, or you’re relaxing either. You’re kind of running around you, probably building up the sweat from time to time too, which was the whole perspiration and the cold is probably a horrible combination sometimes.
ANDREW: Yeah, the sweating thing happens because you’re going in and out of a (koji muro). Normally it’s rice steaming, then you do the mashing, what they call shikomi. At most breweries, the next stage is the muro, you know, making koji.
And that’s where you struggle because it’s very, very cold outside. You don’t just go into this room, do all the work and then leave. You go in and out of that room a few times, each day, So you go in, of course, you take as many items of clothing off as possible. But then when you then build up a full body of sweat, and then you walk outside into what is colder than a refrigerator.
And so it’s actually really, for the first couple of months, it really takes out on your body kind. It takes a while to adapt to that change in temperature. But you do get used to it.
But other than that, I actually didn’t find it that tiring. It was only when I started taking on a bit more responsibility in my second season that I realized that what I’d been told was correct.
It’s a very physical job.
BRAD: I’ve only heard about it secondhand. And I’ve read one of Philip Harper’s books. His intro to it was his start as a sake brewer. Which sounds in a lot of ways, kind of vaguely similar to yours. Kind of begging for a job and the brewers looking at him as an oddity at first, and not sure really what he was going to do, or if he understood the full dynamic of what he’s about to dive into.
And he famously was so tired at one point, he tried to sleep next to a river. And he fell into the water and cracked his head open. Then he realized he had to get back. He was only on a break and had to get back to the brewery. And he’s got blood all over his face. And everybody’s just like, what is this guy doing?
And just another day in the life of a brewer, I guess, or a particularly crazy one.
ANDREW: Yeah. One of the most stupid things that I said to someone that I look up to was Phillip Harper. And I met him very soon after my brewing, my first season finished. And as I said, I’d only really done half a season.
And for all the reasons I just said, I didn’t really feel that fatigued. And I went up and met him up in Kyotango (Kyoto). And he was nice enough to give me some advice and what have you. And then he said, so how was it? And I sort of said, actually, very confidently, it wasn’t that bad. And I wasn’t that tired.
And I saw his face drop and it was only afterward I realized what a stupid thing to say. You know, first of all, you know, you can never compare two people’s scenarios, different breweries, different things. Of course, I should have followed up with I only did half a season. And it just made me quite rightly look stupid that I told this brewer who was exhausted after his own brewing season, that I wasn’t that tired.
And it sounded like I was saying it wasn’t that bad.
BRAD: Yeah, he’s a legend, And you’ve got to have a certain kind of endurance to be able to do that, and year after year.
ANDREW: So, yeah, I did apologize after. And two years later after I did my first stint living in a brewery, I messaged them again and said, okay, now I’m tired.
Um, you know, that was, you know, that was probably closer to the experience he had in his first season.
BRAD: Yeah, it’s really cool you got to meet him too. I mean, he’s iconic. And in some ways, you’re sort of mirroring, or following in his footsteps. Here’s this guy who’s, he’s totally revolutionary, but he’s also kind of looking to the past in some ways.
And some of his techniques, these forward-thinking sake that he makes, and yet he’s doing some things that a lot of brewers have kind of moved past. It takes a lot of risk. He creates a style that not everybody likes, you know, Tamagawa sake or Kenbishi, or something like that. It’s so rich and kind of wild in its style.
And yet, a lot of people that haven’t had very much sake, and I turn them onto it, they love it. And so I think it’s kind of interesting to hear his foreign perspective, his outside perspective, doing this very traditional thing. He’s kind of created a whole new pathway forward.
And well, I guess I’m kind of getting ahead of myself on that.
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?
Part 2: Andrew Russell Discusses Brewing Sake in Japan
The conversation does not end here. Part two explores the daily and seasonal routines of a sake brewer, how to land a brewing job as a foreigner, and more.