Talking sake with Toji Philip Harper at Kinoshita Brewery

0:20Welcome to another edition of Sake On Air. with the very generous help of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association. We are now in a very different location, and we are sitting across from a coffee table in a very lovely room from the, this is a name that many people listening to this are going to know, the one and only Philip Harper, who has agreed to let us invade his off-season downtime to share some stories and some stats maybe and some prognostications even about the state of the industry and the state of his life running a sake brewery in Japan. So thank you, Philip, very much for joining us.

1:08Thank you for having me. Yeah, good to see you. I would also like to make sure that everybody is aware that I am joined by two of my esteemed colleagues. To my right is Cindy and to her right is Frank. These are two folks who you have heard their names a million times and their voices as well. And we drove out here from Kyoto as a trio this morning. And thank you for driving. You're very welcome. This is a nice little road trip for us. It's a fun time to get out of Tokyo. Still a little too hot this summer, but... It's a bear. But we are in an air-conditioned space, and I'm very grateful for that.

1:46And I am a little bit, this happens every time. We've already started the conversation before the mic was running. So we might have to cover some territory because it was very interesting. So Phil, could you please just give us a brief introduction that will be lovely as a review for all the folks who know of you. And then a great way for people to get on board with where we're starting. Yeah, well, my name is Philip Harper. I'm originally from the UK. and I came to Japan pretty much on a whim when I was 22 and got hooked on sake pretty quickly and started making sake for a living in 1991 and I've been doing that ever since.

2:28So I've worked for four different breweries and I joined this brewery, the Kinoshita Brewery, where we make Tamago Asake 18 years ago. So I'm coming up to my 19th season here. So kind of depressing to be this old, but it'd be lots of fun to do it. What brought you to this brewery? What was the sag? So, I mean, I was working in a brewery in Osaka before this one. And in my final season there, I knew I was leaving. and I was talking to a guy who sold brewing gear there. And at that point, that company was a father and son outfit and the son was in charge of the Osaka Brewery and the father was in charge of this brewery.

3:20And the guy who was the master brewer here before me, he started working when he was 16 and he worked here his entire life until unfortunately he died of cancer 19 years ago. And so my boss had never worked with another master brewer. And as you know, things have been tough for the sake industry for a long time. And so my boss was thinking, you know, maybe this is the time to close shop. And he discussed this with the father of this company, the owner of this company that sold the brewing gear here because they worked together for years and he trusted him. and of course because this is Japan the guy said well it's you can like close it that's your privilege but your ancestors will be sad and this is this guy I'd like to introduce you to so he introduced me and so my boss said okay we'll we'll we'll give this this thing another go and here we are that's that's amazing and so you just almost it was unplanned but you ended up walking into a completely like changing the chapter type of situation absolutely yeah i mean so i mean like as you as you know i mean the the overall production of sake has gone down and down and down um and uh that's true for breweries in this area as well i mean the our this has never been a big brewery I mean you hear this story with a lot of breweries where they were making loads of sake back in the day and now they only make a little bit of sake but we were never one of those breweries that made loads of sake it was always only ever a small brewery and sales the decline of sales was not as dramatic as it was for most of the local breweries but even so things had been getting harder and harder and the boss I mean he'd done he'd been doing stuff because obviously you know the sales hadn't gone down as much as for other local breweries but he had done everything he could think of and so he kind of he he'd already come to the conclusion that business as usual was just not working and so like when when I mean it was maybe one reason why he did this mad thing of hiring a foreign sake brewer which is kind of I mean I mean a weird thing to do and I mean so business as usual was already exhausted as a strategy so when he hired me I mean he told me right from the outset that basically i mean it was a very traditional brewery where the our most distant customer in those days was 20 minutes away by car so you couldn't find any of tamagawa sake in kyoto city or osaku city let alone tokyo or overseas so it was a you know sort of classic old school system where just brewing for the local people and so you know he said to me well we have the sake that that pays the rent that the local people drink we'll leave that we leave that as it is um and that is the business as usual bit um that we'll leave alone and we just need to do a load of stuff so come up with a bunch of ideas and so that was my brief and that's kind of what we've done yeah so this was like about 2007 right um yeah yeah like what were your challenges with that i mean you're taking over from a well seasoned well established told you that's been here for 45 years um what were your initial challenges because the brief seems pretty open yeah um well i mean so i mean in a sense i mean it's it's kind of like uh blue skies right i mean you can go anywhere with that um by that stage i mean i'd already been brewing i'd already been in this industry for like 17 years or something um and i mean so obviously just work selling sake to the local people that that was that was that That's okay, but we leave that alone.

7:03And the obvious market for me to go to was selling to specialist sake retailers, which was basically the market that I was used to, the market that I'd always worked in. And so, you know, that was where we were going to go. The boss wanted to make, at that stage, they had a shibori tate sake here. And that was basically, it was just the regular sake, except it wasn't pasteurized. and the boss said I wanted to make I want to make a junmai style shibori tate which like doesn't sound that radical now but back then in this market it was kind of a radical thing to do and you know so the boss had said to me you know we need to come up with a bunch of products I mean I love omachi rice so I said well I'd be kind of really pleased to do that so he said okay to that um there's ey rice in Kyoto prefecture and they didn't use that here and I said you know we're a Kyoto brewery, maybe we should do something with that.

7:55So we started brewing with Iwe Rice. And also, I mean, I've always really liked making and drinking Kimoto and Yamaha style sakes. And, you know, again, you know, the specialist retail marketing, obviously, there's a niche for that as well. So I said, yeah, we're going to try some of that. They've never done that here before. So that was a totally new thing that we started. So that was the kind of where we started in the first year there for. making new products and and the the this in terms of staffing in that first year they we even in those days we did it we rice polishing in a house and so there was a local guy to do that for me and one of the people I worked with in the Osaka brewery when I when I moved there he said take me with you so he came with me from Osaka so for those first couple of years he and I would eat dinner and drink sake together every night so it was good to have him with me you know this is like somebody i knew and somebody i trusted and there were two local guys who had worked with the previous brewer the boss introduced me to them before the brewing season started and they said we're not going to do it and i've been talking to the owner already about brewing schedules and stuff and i mean it was the old system where basically it was given that you would work without the day off and I said to the boss you know this is kind of maybe not such a good idea anymore and that we probably ought to like set up the brewing schedule so I can give people days off in rotation and the boss had already said okay to that and so when I met these two guys and they said we're not doing this anymore and I said why they said well there's like no days off and I said ah well actually so I pulled that excuse from under their feet because I'd already like set up a schedule where they would have days off in rotation.

9:45And so they agreed to stay with me, which turns out to be very fortunate because they're still with me now. Those two guys will be rolling up for their 19th season with me in a few weeks. So, you know, if those two guys hadn't been here, I would have been like dead and buried a long time ago. They carried a lot of weight for me over the years, for sure. Because that's what often happens, right? When a new Tucci comes in or there's a big change in what you're doing, the old stuff often leaves or has to adjust in one way that they don't want to? Yeah, I mean, and before we started, I mean, we were talking about the old days, which is when I find I'm from.

10:22And I mean, in the old days, so brewery owners didn't hire curabital, didn't hire brewery workers, they hired a torgy, they hired a master brewer, and the master brewer would bring his team. So when the master brewer changed, he took his team with him. So it was always in those days, it was automatically a complete change of personnel. and that doesn't tend to work in the same way anymore but even so you still often get a lot of and it's a big thing when you get the guy in charge of the brewing changes that always is a moment for lots of things good and bad to happen in a brewery I'm sure those first couple of years must have been just a crazy experience can you give us some colour on that both the good and the bad Well, I mean, yeah, so this was like the fourth brewery I'd worked in.

11:13And I mean, changing breweries is like an insane thing to do. I mean, it's hard to explain how challenging it is. Even like, I mean, I'd done it a few times before I came here. But automatically, you know, the water's different, the equipment is different, everything is different. And I mean, I was in an Osaka brewery before I came here. I mean, you look on the map, it's not that very far. but in Osaka in the winter it's blue skies and it's like really crisp and dry and up here you don't see blue skies from autumn till spring it's like always overcast and lots of snow and very high levels of humidity and I mean so when I started making corgi it's like a totally different thing I mean I didn't sleep for about a week because the corgi just wouldn't do what I wanted it to do at all and you have to like totally rethink things to be able to do the same thing So there were all that kind of, like all the automatic stuff that happens when you move from one brewery to another.

12:14And there were changes that had to be made, sort of, I mean, as it was pretty common. You can even now, you can find it a lot of small breweries. There aren't any walkways. You find people just working on ladders the entire time, which is like very inefficient and dangerous. So the first thing I did when I arrived was I built walkways so that it wouldn't have to be ladders anymore. In terms of equipment, again, you know, it's a small brewery. There's not loads of money flying around to buy tons and tons of equipment or whatever. But in the bus, he wanted to make this Shibori Tate product, a Jinma style.

12:57And I mean, I suggested making it a Jinmai Ginjo because you can get it at a higher price point. And so the boss agreed to that. And this is like good on paper. And then you start thinking about the practicalities of it. And if you're making kind of regular style sake, then temperature control is a relatively low key thing. If you're making Jinmai Ginjo, then, you know, you have to be a little bit fussier about that kind of stuff. And we didn't really have the necessary equipment to do that. so we had to buy a chiller for water right out of the gate and there was this really crusty old rice washing machine and I really didn't want to do it with that so we bought little rice washing machines as well right out of the gate yeah and I mean then you kick off the brewing and you're working with these two guys who'd worked with the previous brewer I mean he hadn't really taught them any brewing stuff at all I mean they were just like machines to carry stuff and I mean you know it's obviously the first time I'd worked with them but they were both like really really keen and hard working and I thought it's kind of like a shame to just like having them like carry stuff and back then I mean we were you can translate this 300 koku was our was our our brewing schedule and I mean at that kind of range I mean it's quicker basically I could have it was quicker for me to do everything else than it is to teach people but you know they were so keen and I thought this is like I mean they're so keen I mean so and so I put one in charge of the yeast starter and one in charge of the main mash and you have I had to teach them like from from absolutely from zero to do that in the first year.

14:47But in a couple of years, we were making twice that. And then if I'd been trying to do that on my own, I would have been like hospitalized in no time. So it was lucky for me that I did sort of get them out of the gate in that first season to do that stuff. Were you in a leadership position at the previous brewery? Yeah, so when I joined that brewery, there was another master brewer there and he left halfway through and I became master brewer. So, yeah, I mean, I had been in that seat before I got here. And how did Kurabito take your first suggestions of doing that? Because they were with the other Jochi for such a long time, just caring and being told, put this here, put this there.

15:28Like, was it convincing needed from you saying, like, guys, would you like to learn? Or were they very keen? Or did they take it easily? I can't really remember how it was. It wasn't like I was, like, bullying them into doing something that they didn't want. but you know it's a challenging thing to do you know so so you know it's pretty challenging for both of them for sure but I mean I don't I don't think it was something that they would like really didn't want to do when I made them do it I think they were they were happy to learn this stuff and to do it and I mean you know you come into if you come into this situation where there are people who are already in place you don't want to say that everything you've done before is rubbish but on the other hand if there are things that need to be changed you have to and getting that right is like one of the really tricky things that you have to do in that situation and like I mean so like talking about this um the rice washing machine I mean the the rice washing protocol here before I came was that you it was I don't know if you've seen probably not there's like it's kind of like a screw thing and you you bung the rice in this and it and it rotates in a screw with water and then it falls out the end and that that means that the rice is washed and so they would put the rice in here and it would come out the end and fall into the steamer and it would sit there until the following day and I mean I did not like this rice washing system so we bought the new machines but I didn't want to say to my guys that you've been doing it wrong all this time and so we washed the rice for the corgi with the new machines and I thought okay we'll do the other stuff the way they'd done it before and we did it and I mean I kind of knew what was going to happen if you if you if you have rice kicking around at high temperatures you you get like bacterial growth and it it turns a funny color when you steam it um and so it it did that and I said and so at that point I said I'm just over this and so we we bin the machine and did it with the new machines after that um and they were okay with it you know because they they saw the difference you know and I mean we we did a lot of stuff that there was like more work and stuff um but they they got on with it and and didn't complain and and uh and really i mean especially those two guys because because now i mean i'll have to show you the brewery later but um now we have more equipment and stuff and back then we really didn't so those those guys worked with me in in the dark ages when things were really tight and tough so I owe them a lot for sure.

18:00You said that you know you've talked about this a couple of times that you live together through the season. Can you paint that picture for us? Yeah well so I mean I keep banging on about the old days and in the old days brewers were basically all farmers occasionally fishermen and they would leave their homes and families and live in the brewery until the season was finished in spring and then they go home and do their rice fields again and that's that's the system that i learned to brew in um and i mean that's more or less gone most breweries now the majority of breweries i think work with um people employed year-round and even breweries where there are seasonally employed people you don't get this thing so much now of people living in the brewery like like like it used to happen um and now so my my team they're all seasonal um and i have uh uh four four local guys who come from home unless they're in the graveyard shift in which case they they were sleepier as well um and then the other there are five of us who who live in um and so um we eat three meals a day together um drink sake together um this this japanese expression of like eating from the same rice pot um and i mean it is a really interesting thing i mean it's like it's not it's not the same as a normal workplace relationship if you actually live and work in the same place.

19:23I think you do build up a different kind of relationship with those guys.

19:29There's a lot of really good things about it but in most breweries now it's not an option for a lot of breweries. I think it can be a really, really valuable thing and it's fun to have people to eat and drink with yeah if you get on if you get on but i mean you have to get on i mean you know i mean the the cliche about about harmony and war being the the the glue that that keeps bruce is absolutely totally true and i mean even more true in the old days because you live together i mean so in the old days here we are again um the a master brewer would usually have his own room but everyone else slept in the same room you know so you'd have like eight guys sleeping in a room this size and then waking up at the crack of dawn and working together and then working together in the night and I mean things can get ugly pretty quickly there if you if you have like friction and tension so this thing about harmony that's not it's not some kind of like wishy-washy philosophical thing it's that absolutely necessary part of successful brewing.

20:36Sure. Who makes the meals? So we have a nice lady who comes and cooks for us and they they they buy a boxed lunch, which is okay. And then our nice lady, she rolls up in the afternoon and cooks dinner for us and a couple of bits and pieces for breakfast. And if she can't make it, then it used to be the brewery owner's wife would do the cooking for us. And as of last year, the brewery owner's son's wife is now rolled up to be the pinch hitter if our nice cook lady can't make it for some reason. so she's the most important part of the person in the brewery as far as my guys are concerned it's all Japanese food you don't get like a big English breakfast or anything?

21:21No no it's totally Japanese home cooking we're obviously lucky and grateful to have her great that's cool I'm jealous how big has the team gotten? so that first year there were five of us and now there are nine including me and the rice polishing guy and so I have it set up so like there's somebody who's on holiday every day and so if this was the brewing season now and I'd be here talking to you that would mean there'd be six people doing the brewing and if there aren't visitors or meetings or whatever I'm there as well then there are seven of us on duty because the rice polishing guy he's out back doing his own thing so he's kind of separate schedule and that represents a move from 300 koku to no 300 to to about a thousand there about a thousand yeah yeah wow

22:20so the it sounds like from what i'm getting the the whole process of philip the brand new toji coming in, basically revamping not only the way that the sake is made, but also the mindset of the brewery and the reach of the products. That process sounds like it went pretty well. But I have to assume that there were some pretty interesting hiccups in there. Yeah, I mean, it makes you kind of tired to think about it. In those days, as I say, it was totally local market. And there was one hotel chain locally that sold probably 40, almost half of all the sake that was made here. And for really stupid, nonsensical reasons, the owner there, he told my boss, I think at the end of November that year, that he wasn't going to buy the sake anymore.

23:29so suddenly we were like looking at a 40 % reduction in sales which was that was a moment for sure oh wow um yeah um but you know so I mean I mean so in my mind I mean um if it works at 300 I mean that's cool but in on with normal second pricing basically you can't make a living with making that So, you know, it's obvious that we had to make more, we had to sell more. So I'm not really a very business-minded person, but I mean, it was like, even to me, it's like obvious that the only answer is to make more and sell more. So I wasn't sure what the right sort of volume to aim for was. But my boss had in his head this thing that one day he wanted to make a thousand kokoos.

24:15I mean, I didn't know if that was the answer or not, but I mean, so there was our breeze then suddenly to get somehow starting at 300 and got to get to 1 ,000 is the plan. And we started making the new stuff.

24:32And we did the shibori tate, the Junmai Ginjo one, and we shipped that unpasteurized, unfiltered, undiluted, which again is not something that you usually do. and they didn't really do any unpasteurised sake here at that stage and so we had to buy a fridge or something so we were going to buy a shipping container and you know they have the 20 feet ones and the 40 feet ones and I mean I said yeah well we haven't got any money and 20 feet will probably be enough and the boss said well okay yeah but I mean it's not that much difference so we'll buy a 40 foot one and we bought a 40 foot one and the next year we had to buy another one because there wasn't enough space and so on and so on And you know, you make all these new products and some of them sell as much as you would like and of course some of them don't.

25:18So there's the issue then of what to do with whatever sake is left over and I mean that was kind of a key moment for us because the first master brewer I worked for, he made an indestructible sake. I drank the last bottle of sake that I had a couple of years ago and it was like 30 years old at that point and it had been in the fridge for 10 years and at room temperature for 20 and it was still great and so that's how I learned to brew and so I said to my boss you know so he said what we're going to do is we have unpasteurized sake left well obviously fridge is like one one thing for that but I said to him you know the sake I make I mean you know I haven't made sake at this brewery yet so we didn't know for sure but I mean all the other brewing that I'd done And I knew that I could make sake that would last.

26:07And I said, well, if it goes as it should, then if we have leftover sake, it's not going to go bad. It will get better. And he didn't know that. He didn't. But, I mean, he trusted me on this. And so we started doing this and saying, like, in six months or whatever, you've got, like, six months old sake, which is, in the normal world, is just generally, obviously, it's not good for cash flow. but also quality wise, if it's not the right kind of sake, that's not going to be good either. And he saw that it was true that the sake got better over time. And that was a key thing for us because I love aging sake and I think it's weird that the sake industry hasn't done more with this stuff over the years.

26:49And so this was one of the things that I suggested to him. And so that was a key thing because he saw that it was true that the sake didn't get worse, that it was going to last. and when the new sake came out I'd already been in touch with a few of the retailers that I'd worked with in the past and so when we pressed the sake I would send samples and we got some orders that way and then in the later half of the season it came time to do the Yamaha that I'd asked to do and they'd never made a Yamaha sake here before so that was totally new and the guy I put in charge of the yeast starter, so you start with the normal Sokojo yeast starter, and so I say, here's the yeast, here's the lactic acid, if you forget to put this in, we are screwed.

27:39And so I spent like several months telling him this, and then we start doing the Yamaha, and like there's no lactic acid and there's no yeast, and then we say, totally different from everything that he spent the last few months learning. And I mean, I'd done Yamaha and Kimoto at all the breweries that I'd worked for up to that point, I've been doing that for quite a while. And this job is a conversation with microorganisms. And in recent years, I've been kind of thinking about the very few breweries that make sake without using pure yeast cultures when they're making Yamaha or Kimota. Very few.

28:15And you're taught that you're not allowed to do that. It's incredibly dangerous. And it's just completely beyond the pale. You're not supposed to do it. but I mean thinking about you know here we are with with this brewery that nobody has heard of and we've got to find a way to get into new markets and Yamaha is isn't as a thing that some people are really interested but you know there are lots of Yamaha in the world and so I thought maybe this is the time to to try making Yamaha with wild yeast which I'd never done before but I'd been kind of thinking about it and seeing how how it might work in for the over in the sort a few years before I came here.

28:48And I'll show you the brew in a minute. You'll see we have wooden buildings with earth walls. And I mean, it looks like there should be fun stuff living there. And so I thought, OK, I'm going to give this a go. I'm going to try and make it without adding yeast, which I'd never done before. And as I say, your tort is incredibly dangerous and you're not supposed to do it. And I didn't actually mention this to the boss. So he said, OK, we're going to make Yamaha. and I mean he's a kind of traditional brewery I want to say he's not always looking over your shoulder all the time you're the brewer and you do the brewing and so I started doing this it's very nerve wracking stuff because it's like incredibly dangerous and I'd never done it before and you know sort of three weeks in it's all bubbling along and it's like doing all the stuff the good stuff that it's supposed to do and so I said to the boss can you come and look at the Yamaha yeast starter because it's like up to speed now and he comes and looks and he says oh yeah this looks good I said actually I didn't actually put any yeast in and is that even a thing and we and so we the yeast starter went well we made the sake pressed the sake and my boss told he told me later that that he'd never drunk anything that that dense and complicated and thick and he really didn't think that this was a thing that that was sellable and when he first tasted it and so we did the same thing that we'd done with the other sakets you know we'd sent little samples to the retailers that I'd worked with in the past and when we sent those out suddenly they all came they they up until then you know they'd phone up and say okay send us a few cases and that sake kind of like was a bit of a game changer for all of them because it was this like really really funky wild umami bomb and when they heard again that we'd done it without adding yeast this is a very rare thing obviously and so suddenly we had all these like retailers rolling up from from Osaka and Narra and places and and shocking my boss that was the first season you were here first season yeah wow yeah and I mean people have said to me I wasn't it like really really rash or daring or whatever to do this in your first season but I mean so if you if you think about it if I'd done it the normal way and added yeast in the first season it had gone well then it's kind of really difficult to say right now I'm going to do it without and I mean say it was the first batch and I mean if it had gone wrong I could have just like apologized a lot you want to make your mistakes early and then well you can go back to the normal way if you have to right if you're going to do it if you're going to do it I mean um yeah and so so we did that um and when I came here and I was talking to the the year-round staff who who sell the stuff they all said like we have um sake flavored ice cream here and they everyone said to me, you know, in the summer we sell like, ice cream sells like crazy, but we can't sell any sake.

31:45And so I said, okay, well, so we should make a sake that goes with ice cream.

31:52And there were a couple of people that made these kind of like sakes from antique methods. And I tasted a few of them and knew that they would be great with ice cream. So I talked to this guy uh horie sensei from shimane prefecture who is who is a big uh sake researcher and i mean he'd worked with me in other breweries i knew that he was he was really expert in that in that kind of brewing so i phoned him up and said explain sort of broadly what kind of stuff i was aiming for and i said have you got any recipes and so he sent me a bunch of recipes and i chose one um and uh we we brewed according to the recipe and what came out we called time machine um and so So that was originally made to go with the, we'll give you the ice cream later, you can taste it.

32:36And so that's where that started. Do you know where the original recipe came from? Yeah, it's from a book, well a scroll actually, from 1712. Okay. And it's from the Hiroshima region. And I mean, it's like lists of instructions for brewing and making carpenters' tools and a whole bunch of other stuff. I always assumed it was found in here for some reason right well if you go to New York the story in New York is that I was like knocking down a wall in the brewery and this recipe fell out of the wall and it's a really good story so I don't actually contradict it if I can help it that's probably why it's still around yeah I know Horie Sensei faxed it to me I love it he faxed it too But then also the label is kind of a little bit different than normal.

33:33Like, can you talk a little bit about the label for Time Machine? For Time Machine or for all the labels? I mean, probably for all the labels, but maybe we start with Time Machine as we're... Well, Time Machine, so yeah. So I mean, when I made the sake, we didn't have a name for it. We had a concept, it had to go with ice cream. And then we have to think of a product name. And the boss said to me, like, we're the only brewery in Japan with a foreign brewer, so I want an English product name. And so when we had this product, and I mean, it's thinking, okay, it's from this 300-year-old recipe, and so we call it Time Machine.

34:07And then when it came to making a label for it, the central logo, which my guys called Marotama, the round logo, that was made for us by the boss's brother-in-law, who is a big wig Japanese artist who's far too important to be doing label design. But the boss had been kind of thinking about asking him, but because he was so important, he hadn't really dared. And then, you know, when I arrived and it was all this new stuff going, he said, you think this is the time to ask him. And it turns out that our previous label had been a very conventional calligraphy label. And it turns out that the boss's brother-in-law really didn't like the previous labels and thought they were really boring.

34:48And so he kind of wanted to do it. And so he did that design for us, that really cool design we have. so that's the center of the time machine label as well and the label shows a picture of a sake brewery from 1712 and if you look closely you can see there's a little robot with our logo for a head so he's there pottering around a brewery 300 years ago seeing how it was done and that Marutama, the logo that you have at the moment because for me I always thought it was a face but maybe it's not It's not a face. It's actually the kanji for Tamagawa. But normally you write with a brush, and Sakane-sensei, the way this guy did it, is it's kind of a similar system to woodblock printing, where you cut away, and the remaining part is the character.

35:43Nuki-ji it is in Japanese. And so when he had the design ready, me and Mos, we went to his house in Kyoto to see it, and it's like a big room like this with like like dozens and dozens of these things spread around the room um and he said so here they are um and you can choose anyone you like this one has my soul in it well there you go we'll have that one yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a cool design i mean i like i like the calligraphy labels too but i mean it however cool the calligraphy is it's still calligraphy and I mean if you're foreign you can't read it and if you're Japanese and you drink a lot the next day you can't remember which one it was um where you know our logo people remember it um and I mean like you said it looked like a face to you even for Japanese people I mean it's very stylized so it doesn't or it's not even immediately apparent always to Japanese people that that's the kanji for tamagawa um and people who don't read Japanese a lot of people will see that as a face if you turn it sideways it looks like fish bones and like restaurant people say this is fish bones um some japanese people think it's the character for kotobuki for this lucky character oh yeah and so i mean it's it's a the guy he's he's not a designer he's a he's a hardcore artist guy um and so you know it's it's it's a it's a much more powerful object than i think that you get coming out of um some design studio it's been a big part of what we do for sure yeah because it's really memorable i mean even because i'm not a big japanese speaker or reader but it always stood out to me you know and there's something that's really artistic about it but also you can when you said like oh this is my soul in it it makes sense yeah you know you look at it and it's like yeah there's something different about it yeah well because i mean i mean i've worked um four different breweries three different breweries before this and i mean i've never felt a stronger connection to to to to a label you know because it is a really powerful object i think yeah yeah there was a question earlier before we went on air that i thought was your answer to it was really um interesting and i know we already we already went through it but uh it's the fact is basically when you're working at a brewery that follows the older system you're only getting paid for the time that you're physically in the brewery what do you do you have any aware do you know what your got your team does when they're not here what other vocations they have today.

38:10Yeah, so I mean, the classical system would be, they would all be farmers, but that's kind of, that's kind of gone now, pretty much. There's one guy who does a bit of farming. My rice polishing guy, he works on the local golf course. Okay. One guy, his family have a beach restaurant, so he's raking in the cash over there now. One guy, he works on the tea harvest in June. one guy goes around the world on his bike one guy who works for me is a carpenter so he's carpentering now does he carpentry when he's here sometimes? no, no, I mean when he's here he's working for me I mean if something needs fixing oh yeah for sure, I mean it's always a good idea to have a carpenter in the team if you can manage it I agree and it's really funny because carpentry and sake brewery is a very old school Japanese work environments and this whole shokunin thing which is like a very weird specific subculture within Japan and because he's a carpenter and I mean he's from Tajima so he's like a country carpenter guy so when he talks to me in Japanese he's like very extremely polite and formal in the way he addresses me because when he comes to work for me I'm the oyakata, I'm the boss and so he brings that with him from his culture and I mean he's been working with me five years now and you know when he's doing brewing stuff he's a great worker he remembers stuff really really quickly and I mean he gets on great with everyone so it's all good and then if you ask him to do like some carpentry job and he puts on his carpenter belt and he suddenly turns into a completely different person it's really interesting to watch cute when you guys are because you spend so much time together when the sake comes out what are you drinking?

40:08Well I mean so I mean obviously we're tasting every batch as it is pressed through the winter of course we're also tasting like random stuff I mean we age loads of sake here as well so there's always that conversation of like new old stuff coming online as well and you know my guys a lot of them are really interested in sake as well so I mean I will buy other people's sake other people will buy so you know we're pretty much almost every day at the end of the working day we're down here um tasting sake it's an education as education as it's work yeah um and i mean our rule is is always that that you never know what you're tasting it's always blind tasting so if you're being really really rude about the sake you could be being really really rude about your own sake yeah um and so that's that's absolutely always the rule um that's so smart because i know people and they're kind of like oh i don't really like that brewery but i know they would love what i'm giving them from that brewery but they already have this prejudice before just because the name of it yeah sure you know yeah it's like cocktails on a cocktail menu yeah you know you know you don't like it because it's a it's this type of cocktail yeah and you know i I mean, most days we will actually rank the sake on the five-point scoring system standard for sake.

41:30And, you know, I mean, so most of these guys have been with me for a long time now. And we do this all the time. So, I mean, if we say, so everyone scores the sake, then we don't get the thing where one guy is scoring at a one and one is scoring at a five. It's all very concentrated. We know what we think. And, I mean, our sake is pretty weird. and conventional brewers don't approve of it often. But we know what it's supposed to be like, and so my guys will score that accordingly. And when we get sake from other breweries as well, I mean, so there are different approaches to scoring sake as well.

42:11I mean, so there's the traditional sake industry scoring system, which is very Jinjo-oriented, the kind of Hiroshima system, if you like. and I mean my guys can do that as well but you have to be clear because I mean they basically they score sake opposite ways if they're talking about the Hiroshima system or the what we want to drink system gives opposite results in our brewery the what we want to drink rubric and so you know there are different protocols for tasting sake and I mean we get totally different results depending which system we're scoring by but we can do it either way you just have to flip it as somebody who's really been an innovator within Nihon Shoe over the past 20 years especially here have you seen any other things that have, any other inventions or new ways of doing things that have been interesting to you