Showing the world how real soy sauce is supposed to taste
I know nothing about soy sauce or brewing in general, so naturally I will now prescribe improvements to the process from my perch on HN:<p>Why not get rid of the ridiculously complicated (but truly beautiful) barrels, and instead use pieces of kioke wood, maybe from actual kioke barrels, in stainless vats?  In other words, brew the soy sauce in stainless vats, but seed the cultures using pieces of wood that harbor the microbes.  Why does the wood need to take the form of a barrel?<p>This would be similar to how I make traditional kefir, or how my mother makes kombucha.  We just put the stuff in a glass jar (milk for kefir or tea+sugar for kombucha), and add bugs.  In this process, a big piece of koike would serve the same purpose as kefir grains or a kombucha baby; it would supply the biology, and the brewing process in turn would feed the microbial colonies in the wood, the same way making kefir feeds the bugs in the kefir grains so you can keep using them indefinitely.<p>To anyone who actually knows about brewing: does this sound remotely plausible?