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Sustainable sake: Tokyo brewer utilizes music, modern-day methods to counter climate effect

The gentle lilt of a flute fills a confined secondstorey area in Tokyo that houses a. burbling barrel of fermenting sake.

The bacteria in the 670-litre (147-gallon) tank will take. more than 2 weeks to turn its contents of rice and water into. Japan's standard alcohol.

But they are not only alive, they are listening too, stated. brewer Yoshimi Terasawa, and the kind of music coming from a. speaker listed below the tank identifies how the spirit will taste.

The micro-organisms inside are activated by the vibrations,. and the taste changes, stated the 63-year-old chief brewer of. Tokyo Port Brewing.

Music is among the unconventional techniques Terasawa is. using at the only sake factory in the heart of the capital.

Stuffed into a narrow four-storey building, the small-batch. operation uses methods that promise to help the industry. withstand the fallout of environment change.

It uses modified equipment and ergonomic processes that. consume less energy and labour than a standard open-air. brewery in the countryside.

Making sake on this sort of smaller scale makes it easier. to keep the production environment consistent, stated 45-year. industry veteran Terasawa.

The company turns out about 30 kilolitres of sake each year,. or enough to fill almost 42,000 720-ml (24-fl-oz) bottles.

But changing consumer tastes and Japan's aging population. have actually struck need, and the federal government says the variety of sake. breweries has shrunk two-thirds from its 1970s peak to just over. 1,100 now, more than half operating in the red.

Other difficulties are a lack of labour as brewers retire,. rising fuel expenses, and interruption in rice supply because of. worldwide warming.

Terasawa said his compact brewery offered a design to meet. those difficulties.

The process begins on a fourth-floor balcony, where he and. a worker steam the rice for 70 minutes.

Then they depend on gravity to funnel the rice through. apertures in floors and ceilings to a mold-application room on. the third floor, before fermentation on the 2nd, utilizing tap. water, and lastly bottling the sake at ground level.

In the future, little breweries like this will have an excellent. offer of benefit, Terasawa added.

(source: Reuters)