In this episode, Maki and Simone chat with good friends, and fellow TWTT community members, Arline Lyons and Cindy Bissig.

Both women are doing remarkable sake-related work - from tours to translations, and we could've easily done a complete episode with each of them, simply chatting about their involvement with the sake world. However, we wanted to focus on the theme of 'sake brewing experiences' for this particular episode.

Arline, (born in Ireland, residing in Switzerland), and Cindy (born in Switzerland, residing in Japan), are no strangers to many amongst the TWTT community and it was a delight to sit down and chat with them about two places that are currently offering these 'sake brewing experiences': GakkoGura (Niigata) and Kurabito Stay (Nagano).

Arline chats with us about her 2 separate experiences at Kurabito Stay, while Cindy takes us to Sado Island and shares her experience of attending GakkoGura.

GakkoGura and Kurabito Stay are possibly the 2 most well know of the venues offering these types of hands-on brewing experiences, although we know there are others currently offering short internships and some form of hands-on learning. We have also heard whispers of a few more places planning to run brewing experiences or 'courses' that may become accessible in the near future. We hope to come back to this topic in future episodes and chat with other people who have been involved in some of the other brewing experiences out there.

But for now, we hope you enjoy listening to Cindy and Arline chat about their sake brewing experiences as much as we did - and we hope their stories might inspire others to explore this 'behind the scenes' way of learning more about sake.

You can follow our guests on Instagram...

Arline: @tastetranslation

Cindy: @sakenomad

and our podcast and hosts...

TWTT Podcast: @tastewiththetoji

Simone: @sakemistress

Maki: @sake.amata

Julian: @sakeadvocate

This episode was recorded on 3 Apr 2024

A huge thank you to our subscribers at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

More information about Taste with the Toji - The Project can be found on our website: https://tastewiththetoji.com/

Music by: Kazuyoshi Sato (Koikawa Shuzo)

Useful links from this episode:

GakkoGura

GakkoGura flyer (ENG)

Kurabito Stay

Sake on Air

Sake Unplugged

Taste Translation

Sake Nomad