Anyone who says that sake is hangover free is a damn liar.

Saturday we spent a sizeable chunk of the afternoon touring one of the locally renowned sake breweries. The brewery is called Waka-midori and means "Light Green", like the color of new shoots of rice. We arrived about 2:00, Shane, Lara, Jennifer and I along with the hookup; one of lara'a co-workers and his wife. They were both flight attendants in a previous line of work and therefore both had impeccable English. It was the first time that I'd heard a Japanese person use the term "microbe" in a sentence. Not that I doubt the abilities of some of my students, but this was pretty much unheard of from a higshool english teacher. Anyway, we arrived about 2:00 and took a nice little tour of the brewery, tasted some of the fermenting rice sludge and saw the room where they make the starter batch of koji and yeast to get the sake really rocking in the fermenters. They use open fermentation tanks, which I thought was pretty odd, most beer brewers want to seal off any outside influence from various yeasties floating in the air, but I guess that this brewer is famous for his distinctively flavored sake, probably a result of the airborne wild yeast. We sampled some sake from every stage of the process, the rice, the rice mash, the bubbling concoction in the tanks, the freshly pressed finished sake and then some other stuff that had been ageing for a couple of months. The time was about 2:45 and I was a little tipsy due to the high octane levels present in our various samplings and also the fact that among our group, I liked sake the best, therefore prompting me to drink the leftovers from everyone else. Our tour now over, had but to sample the finished wares and be on our way. Little did we know that this would be a 4 hour process.
Mister Imai, the owner brought us into his 100 year old house with magnificent japanese woodwork and screens and sat us all down at his heated kotatsu table where we had a spread of appetizers including salad, fried chicken bits and pickles as well as an assorted selection of at least 9 liters of sake for the group of us. Not only was it sake, but particularly it was "Dai-ginjo" sake which is made from only the core of the rice grain and is also about 20-22 percent alchohol. The weakest stuff at the table was apricot wine which had about 12 percent alchohol. We did our kanpais and our toasts and then proceeded to drink about 7 of those 9 liters. This was followed closely by the owner's wife introducing herself briefly and then whipping up some fried noodles and gyoza dumplings for us. After this last feast we packed up and prepared to go (rather tipsy by now, but since Shane and I at least had ridden bikes, no big problem) only to find that Imai-san had already ordered two pre-paid taxis and refused to let us ride our bikes home. A more awesome display of hospitaltiy I have never seen. Not a yen paid by us and we each left with a giant magnum bottle tucked away in our jackets.

Oh yeah, and we went skiing on sunday, but really, how can you top an evening like that!