It was time to press the sake. I underestimated the effort, was very glad to have a friend help out. Here’s what I have in my garage at the moment:
More pictures here:
http://blog.kuracali.com/?p=188
More squeeze!
It looks good,
How long do you reckon it takes for pressing to finish and do you plan on doing the last part manually? As to applying pressure yourself and not by gravity?
In this case we hung the strainer bags and just let the sake drip over night, then in the morning I had the idea of using elastic to compress the bags. I compressed the bags for about two hours but I didn’t want the sake to spend too much time warming up so I combined the collecting buckets into four full buckets and put them in the cold box.
This is definitely not how I would do it in a production environment-- at least not exactly this way. For one thing I’d want a specially made temperature controlled box and frame to allow for a long “hang time”.
But in a make-do situation it did OK!
And this is what all the effort was for: some sample bottles with proof-of-concept labels containing an example product. These two bottles have already been delivered to the local homebrew store where the staff, who has been interested in my progress, can now judge the outcome for themselves!
