Amami Kokuto Shochu: What Black Koji Does to Brown Sugar

We pour a few kokuto shochu and people reasonably ask what separates them, given they are all brown sugar and all from the same small group of islands. The answer is usually the koji.

A Rule That Sounds Like a Contradiction

Kokuto shochu can only be made in the Amami Islands, and only if rice koji is used. That is a tax ruling from 1959 and we wrote the whole story of how it came about in our post on Nankai, because the reason is stranger than the rule.

So when a bottle of kokuto shochu says black koji, the obvious question is how it can be both.

It is both because those two words describe different things. Rice koji tells you what grain the mould is growing on. Black koji tells you which mould it is. Black koji grown on rice is still rice koji, and it satisfies the rule completely. Almost nobody explains this, so the labels read like a contradiction when they are just two different pieces of information sitting next to each other.

What the Black One Actually Does

Black koji came north from Okinawa, where it developed for making awamori in subtropical heat. It throws off a lot of citric acid. That acidity was originally a practical defence, because it keeps a ferment from spoiling in a climate that wants to spoil everything, but it also ends up in the glass.

The result is a spirit with more depth and a sharper, cleaner edge than the same ingredients would give you otherwise. In a kokuto shochu that matters more than usual, because brown sugar on its own has a tendency to go soft and round and slightly dull. The acidity gives it a spine.

If black, white and yellow koji are new to you, the full breakdown is in our guide to reading a shochu label.

Sugar Without Sweetness

The thing that surprises people most is that it is not sweet.

Brown sugar goes into the ferment and the yeast eats it. What survives distillation is aroma, not sugar, so you get molasses, cane and a little toasted grain on the nose and then a dry finish. People expect something close to a rum liqueur and get something closer to a clean, dry spirit that happens to smell like a bakery.

That gap between what the nose promises and what the palate delivers is most of why this style is fun to hand somebody.

How to Drink It

On the rocks is the standard and the dilution opens up the fruit. Cut with cold water it gets gentler without getting thin.

With hot water it is a different drink again, and in winter it is the better one. The aroma comes up out of the glass before you have touched it. Pour the hot water first, then the shochu, and it mixes itself.

It handles grilled meat, fried food and, unusually for a spirit this dry, it holds up next to dessert.