When the first sake of the season is ready, twenty days after the start of the process, a Shinto priest visits the brewery. After a brief ceremony, he blesses a ball of fresh cedar needles, hung at the entrance to mark the arrival of the new sake. Then, in a ritual known as Kagami Biraki, ‘the opening of the mirror’, the lid of the first barrel is split with small wooden mallets, signaling the beginning of a long celebration in which the villagers are invited to taste the new sake. They also eat small glutinous rice cakes, prepared the old-fashioned way using a mallet and a mortar. The brewery owner’s wife turns the hot mixture deftly between strokes of the mallet, sending up oohs and aahs from the audience as the wooden hammer whizzes past her.