Our last port in Japan is Kobe. However, rather than taking the opportunity to deeply explore the city, I went for one, last teppenyaki experience. What can I say? I’m a sucker for teppenyaki.
But first, we visited Hamafukutsuru Sake brewery. In the parking lot there is a large former sake barrel and the same cedar leaf ball we found at the sake brewery in Niigata.
This brewery offers a better tour experience mainly due to its second floor. There was an introduction video followed by instruction by the brewery’s sales manager (our guide translating, of course). If you visit their website you can find the below map.
On the path are the ever-present sake barrels.
The engineer in me enjoyed the explanation wall. Don’t worry about the text, what I liked is how the modern methods (on top) are shown with the traditional methods.
Sake Making 101:
- Polish the rice, removing the outer layers. A 50% removal yields the highest grade of sake, but takes double the rice for a given volume of sake. Leaving more of the outer layers changes the taste.
- Wash the rice to remove any leftover from the polishing
- Cool the rice to human skin temperature
- Add koji mold to start the fermentation
- Mix with yeast, water and lactic acid for two weeks to create shubo, the “starter” sake
- Now a three-step process that uses the shubo to convert the rice starch into glucose that the yeast transforms into alcohol
- Filter, pasteurize (as needed), store then bottle
- Get drinking!
Of course, they had a sales room at the end of the tour. I bought some rice cracker snacks and a bottle of non-alcoholic amazake. However, the racoon sake warming set caught my eye, but I could not see it surviving a flight home.
Now, it was time for lunch. We traveled to the Tajima teppenyaki restaurant within the Portopia hotel. It had a standard set up.
I’ve never seen teppenyaki grilled buttered toast before. The chef even sliced them into chopstick-sized chunks for us.
After that I was too busy enjoying the meal to take pictures. Ah, I’m such a social media amateur.
That’s it for Japan. We now have two sea days and we dock in Incheon, South Korea, where I will leave for an overnight tour in Seoul. So, there may be a few days until the next post.