Awamori: Okinawa's Spirit, and Why It Uses Thai Rice

Awamori gets filed under shochu by most people, including most menus. It is older than shochu, it is made differently, and the differences are not small.

It Came Through a Kingdom

Okinawa was not part of Japan when awamori started. It was the Ryukyu Kingdom, an independent maritime trading state that ran ships between China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia.

Distilling arrived along those routes, most likely from Siam, sometime around the fifteenth century. It reached Okinawa before it reached mainland Japan, which is why awamori is generally considered the oldest distilled spirit in the country.

The Thai rice is a survival of that trade. Long-grain indica, not the short-grain japonica that Japan grows and eats. Producers still import it, and not out of nostalgia: the harder, drier grain behaves better in the process they use.

All Koji, One Distillation

This is the real technical divide and it is worth understanding.

Most shochu and all sake use a two-stage mash. You make koji from a portion of the grain, start a ferment with it, then add the rest of the grain unconverted for the koji enzymes to work through.

Awamori does not. The entire batch of rice is made into koji. There is no second addition. That is called an all-koji mash, and it means every grain has been colonised by the mould before fermentation even starts.

Then it is distilled once, in a pot still. Once, like honkaku shochu, so nothing gets stripped back out.

The koji is black koji, which is native to Okinawa and produces large amounts of citric acid. In a subtropical climate with no refrigeration that acidity is what stops a mash from spoiling. It is also why awamori has a firm, slightly sharp backbone under the richness. If koji colours are new to you, we broke them down in our guide to reading a shochu label.

Kusu, and Topping Up the Jar

Awamori aged three years or more is called kusu, and Okinawa has an aging tradition that goes further than almost anything else in Japanese drinks.

The classical method is shitsugi. You keep a row of clay jars, oldest first. You draw from the oldest, top it up from the next oldest, top that one up from the next, and so on down the line, with new spirit entering only at the end. Nothing is ever emptied. Done properly across generations, a family's oldest jar has no single age, because it contains a fraction of every year it has ever been fed.

Some pre-war jars survived the Battle of Okinawa. Most did not, and the ones that did are treated accordingly.

What We Pour

Zuisen in three expressions, Hakuryu, Hiryu and Kouryu. Kumejima's Kumesen, a lighter one at 24%, from an outer island. Chuko Ryukyu, which is black koji, atmospheric distillation, mango yeast, and a minimum of three years in clay. Seifuku Vintage, aged three years unblended. And Seifuku Coffee Liqueur, which puts roasted coffee, brown sugar and cocoa into an awamori base and is a genuinely good after-dinner drink.

How to Drink It

Neat if it is aged, because that is where the aging shows. On the rocks otherwise.

Mizuwari, cut with cold water, is the everyday Okinawan way, and traditionally it is mixed ahead of time and left to sit rather than stirred to order. Oyuwari with hot water opens the aroma up in winter.

If you have only ever had shochu, this will taste more assertive and rounder at the same time. Start with the Kumesen if you want an easy way in and the Chuko if you want to understand what the clay does.