Words of advice: never look into how Worcestershire sauce is made.
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What is called liquamen is thus made: the intestines of fish are thrown into a vessel, and are salted; and small fish, especially atherinae , or small mullets, or maenae, or lycostomi, or any small fish, are all salted in the same manner; and they are seasoned in the sun, and frequently turned; and when they have been seasoned in the heat, the garum is thus taken from them. A small basket of close texture is laid in the vessel filled with the small fish already mentioned, and the garum will flow into the basket; and they take up what has been percolated through the basket, which is called liquamen; and the remainder of the feculence is made into allec .
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What a fantastic word.
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Yeah, if you drink a reasonably sized bottle of soy sauce in one sitting, there’s a good chance you’ll die from the salt intake. Wine, probably not.
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I’ve heard that Rastafarians do this on the “left hand side” 
Perhaps you can clear this up for me. I’ve heard that part of Calvados production cycle is generationally passed down to the next… so one generation will not profit off their labor and the next will!
Yes, the video says that there is bacterial yeast in the air that is part of the process and environmentally maintained by the process in that specific location. A kind of atmospheric ‘terroir’ (to use a wine term).
I think this woul be called ‘umamiside’ 
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“Soy sauce is just Japanese Maggi.”
– My dad, ca. 1972
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That’s definitely a running joke among the producers, but it’s not the reasoning behind the production methods, just a grim reality. Good spirits take time to age regardless of claims made about rapid aging techniques such as small barrels and various other technology applied to the process (full disclosure, I was chief distiller at the distillery that pioneered small cask aging and consider the guys at Lost Spirits friends, but there is simply no way to rapidly age spirits. You can make some interesting stuff, but it will never be the same).
What I meant above by “trusting nature” and how it correlates between shoyu and Calvados production is that they are both employing mixed cultures (cerevisiae, lactobaccili, etc), often from spontaneous fermentation (ie, not inoculated with isolated lab-grown biology) whose goal is to coax out as many subtle flavors and aromas as possible and allow the complex generational development of character possible in slow fermentation. Whiskey, for instance, is generally fermented in under 4-5 days with cultivated yeast (which I take issue with as well), but Calvados is fermented for months with indigenous mixed cultures. You are starting to see some of this approach in brettanomyces-fermented and other mixed-culture beers. You get all of those wonderful, weird flavors like tobacco, brine, ham, leather, etc. that are not possible under rapid fermentation with isolated strains. These types of fermentation do wonderfully with longer-term aging you see in Calvados and shoyu.
Unfortunately, a lot of the beautiful hyper-regionality that gave rise to these techniques in the first place is rapidly disappearing due to changes in the licensing laws of France and a de facto end to generational licenses (ie inheritance-based). The reasoning is unsound, inexplicable and tragic. Now the work that grandpere did will likely be the end of the line for many small producers.
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Maybe some mechanical scrubbing to remove built up crap, but almost certainly with nothing more than clean water. That biome has developed over hundreds of years and is very precious.
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There’s 2 local Canadian ones I know of…
https://kojifinefoods.ca/
Or this one:
But they’re local small runs limited to the Greater Vancouver area. Not sure if you can get Amano products outside of BC.
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This is an amazingly generous answer — thank you for it. I’ll be making use of this perspective for Christmas gift-buying.
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My favorite part is when he sticks his finger into the vat and pulls up this giant finger full of brown sludge, eats it, thinks about it… And then doesn’t spit it out. I love that.
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Thank you for your considered response. Very much appreciated.
With regard to shoyu I came away from the video thinking that there may be an atmospheric relationship to the French idea of ‘terroir’. The actual stuff in the air is specific to the place of production and indeed produced by the materials in the wooden vats. Perhaps the term ‘terroir’ already encompasses this in a total sense about importance of place?
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It does! Production varies, of course, but for the most part Calvados are fermented with a cocktail of indigenous yeast and bacteria. These come from the fruit, the facility, the fermenters, the land… everywhere except the lab. In fact, Calvados makers employ a technique that actually removes some yeast, nitrogen and other nutrients from the juice and actually encourages these other, less viable microbes to flourish. This creates the more dynamic palate of French cidre (from which Calva is distilled).
Terroir is more than just the minerals of the earth the fruit is grown in, it is the very essence of the place it is grown. I always said that the best ciders taste like the land, the cattle and, if you’re really lucky, the farmers. 
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I know that you’re joking, but ewwwwwww
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I am not, actually.
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Thanks for the Koji Fine Foods link. I just got some of my Christmas shopping done.
I see he exhibits at the Port Moody Winter Farmers’ Market.
Years ago I visited Mont St. Michel. I was looking for presents for friends back home, and almost every shop had bottles of Calvados for sale, from tiny (about 2 shot glasses) to 500 ml. I believe they were all one brand/regional house, however.
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Ok.
you inspired me to actually look it up:
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But… can you see where this gets woo-woo? I’m perfectly willing to believe it works, or can work exactly as you say, but you’re stretching beyond what our science and tech can validate. A bad actor (perhaps a wayward son. Or daughter) might start mixing the product with cheap substitutes. And humans are very suggestable when tasting. Many a person has been talked into tasting heaven in a very cheap glass of wine. You have to be careful about the limits of the humans doing the tasting. Micronutrients and unmeasureable minerals aside.
