(Publication originale le 13 février 2009)
I knew that soaking was an important process but as is every single step leading to making high grade saké. I had never realized though the complexity and the variability of this soaking time.

It just hit me yesterday when I was doing soaking with Kashira-San (the kashira is the second in command in a kura. Here, this very important job is undertaken by a young but skillful fellow called Ryosuke Uei which is very rare because young people don’t show must interest in the making of saké these days).

We were preparing different batches of rice (2 different types of rice: the well-known Yamada-Nishiki and Nihonbare with different polishing ratios) that needed to be washed and soaked. We had bags of 10 kg each and for every one of each, time was precisely measured.

Kashira-San would put on a board at what time each bag should be pulled out of the water after having been carefully manually undulated.
But he would very often revise those timing after checking the weight of the soaked rice bag in order to obtain a precise ratio (129% for some, 130% for some others… for example 13kg after soaking) especially when we would go from one type of rice to another.

I really enjoyed those many fine tunings and I really understood what it was about… thanks, Kashira-San!

This program is really great, I never thought I would have had so much fun putting rice bags in water!