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At a CT soy sauce brewery, time in a barrel and humble ingredients combine for bold flavors

In the corner of a North Stonington commercial bakery, laden with the sounds of industrial mixers and the scents of baking bread, a quieter and slower process is being led by chemist Bob Florence.

During the 1980s, Florence was working in Japan for the U.S. automobile industry.

Being exposed to Japanese cuisine, was "just kind of life-altering," he said. Especially for a kid who "grew up in Syracuse, where you had pretty much meat-and-potatoes kind of food and very little Asian content."

What started as experiments in home brewing soy sauce in his basement led to the founding of Moromi, one of the few small-batch soy sauce breweries in the United States.

In this Mini-Doc from Connecticut Public, learn more about Florence and his umami-rich creations.

Mark Mirko is Deputy Director of Visuals at Connecticut Public and his photography has been a fixture of Connecticut’s photojournalism landscape for the past two decades. Mark led the photography department at Prognosis, an English language newspaper in Prague, Czech Republic, and was a staff-photographer at two internationally-awarded newspaper photography departments, The Palm Beach Post and The Hartford Courant. Mark holds a Masters degree in Visual Communication from Ohio University, where he served as a Knight Fellow, and he has taught at Trinity College and Southern Connecticut State University. A California native, Mark now lives in Connecticut’s quiet-corner with his family, three dogs and a not-so-quiet flock of chickens.