This evening there is a small craft beer fare with the 5 breweries from the prefecture getting together to launch a brewers association.

Afterwards, the brewers are all getting together to have drinks for the first time.

As you are all aware, I am not yet a brewer as the location securing challenge is immense here. Regardless, one of the brewers invited me to the event and post-event drinks. Subsequently, the other brewers shared their enthusiasm for us to come along.

.. enter the 18 month old daughter who has an uncanny ability to cause sleepless nights immediately before days which require more energy..

Excited to be invited to the inaugural event despite not yet being a fully fledged member of the brewing family but by jingo am I tired.

I really need to get better at writing a daily activity diary for work purposes. I need to submit such a document, in Japanese, to my department head each month and trying to remember everything and piece it together from emails and LINE messages is tough!

The new year family gathering is without a doubt the most challenging event of the year, but I did better than last year when it came to (difficult) conversations and it only took several tonnes of terrible beer to pierce the language barrier..

.. I want to make beer that is easy to talk about despite the language barriers.

Getting closer to Hogmanay, perhaps the only day of the year that I feel vaguely homesick. I miss night time celebrations and bringing in the bells with friends. No real point in me staying up to bring in the new year here.. I will be the only person awake.

My wife just asked my daughter what day her nursery Christmas party is on.. and yep, that’s right, it’s on the 25th, a full school day..

As he sleepily sauntered through the frigid void that exists between the partition of the room where they sleep and the partition where the live, his tired eyes fell upon some clothing atop the chest of drawers.

The long John bottoms eyelessly peered back and nodded, motionlessly before, in a surprisingly gravelly non-voice suggested that “It is time”.

His legs though humbly grateful for the additional warmth knew that it was merely a marriage of necessity and stoicly resolved to endure the additional itch burden they would experience in the months to come.

Reaching out towards the marl grey thermo-regulated undergarments he returned the nod and ceded, “It is time, it IS time.”

We had maybe our last or at least second last design meeting with one of the construction companies we are in discussions with.. should find out how little they remember about our stated budget and how far our endless reconfigurations made that stated budget nonsensically inadequate.. fun times!

One of the (minor) contributors to my decision that I was ready to move to Japan was that Christmas is a lip-service only event here, not laden with the debt-ensuing pressure of buying mountains of gifts so that your kid isn’t bullied (mileage may vary, that’s what it was like for our neighbourhood when I was a kid).

As an example of how it’s not actually treated as a special event, just a low key commercial opportunity for retailers, my wife and I have been requested to attend health checks on the morning of the 25th. Pretty sure we had our annual check ups earlier in the year so don’t need to attend but regardless, it’s just another work day.

Finished reading a book about farmhouse ales today, completing a series of books on sour beers, wild beers and farmhouses.. and I now know my long game aged sour beer approach and have formulated a saison recipe (in my head) to add to my slowly evolving theoretical repertoire.. sure would be nice to have a location for our brewery sorted soon so that we can move towards a point where I can actually make these beers..

For the meantime moving onto a book which I have had for ages but wanted to read after the aftershock of intense studying for my postgraduate course had died down.. all about yeast, 50+ pages down this afternoon and mainly just revision at this point, interesting though.

I have a list of 18 brewing books I am awaiting subsidy approval on so I really should make efforts to get through the ones I previously bought through the subsidy.. probably about 70% done with them though.

My eldest daughter’s first milk tooth has broken free from its gummy domicile.. in this part of Japan there is seemingly an old tradition where you throw teeth from your lower jaw on to the roof of your house and those from the upper jaw, under the house.. for luck, I guess.. apparently it has been decided that this will be happening..

.. all the while I am silently sitting here, wondering how I can somehow switch it with something so I can keep my firstborn’s first tooth as a keepsake..