Miso in Cocktails: Umami Without the Soup

Miso in a cocktail sounds like a stunt. It is not, and the reason is on the ingredient list.

Miso Is a Koji Product

Miso is soybeans, salt and koji, fermented. That third ingredient is the same mould that converts starch to sugar in sake and shochu.

So miso and the spirit you are putting it into are not strangers. They come from the same process, and a shochu made with rice koji and a miso made with rice koji have a family resemblance whether or not you have ever thought about it.

The type changes everything. Shiro miso, white, is short-fermented, pale and slightly sweet. Aka miso, red, is aged longer and is darker, saltier and far more assertive. Those are two different ingredients, not two shades of one.

What Umami Actually Does in a Drink

Cocktails are usually balanced on two axes, sweet against sour. Umami is a third one, and most drinks do not have it at all.

Add it and two things happen. Sweetness stops reading as sugary, because there is something savoury underneath giving it a floor. And the drink gets a rounder, fuller mouthfeel without getting heavier, which is the trick you normally need cream or egg white to pull off.

That is why it works with whisky and shochu specifically. Both are spirits where the base material is still audible, and umami sits with that rather than against it.

We have got it into drinks two ways: as a syrup, and by fat-washing, where you infuse a spirit with something fatty and then chill it until the fat solidifies and can be lifted out. The flavour stays. The grease does not.

The Yakiimo Drink

The one people still ask about was called If You Know You Know, Yakiimo.

Kuro Kirishima shochu infused with butter, miso and honey-roasted Japanese sweet potato, a few dashes of aromatic bitters, and an orange peel over the top. Sweet potato shochu with actual sweet potato in it, the miso keeping the sweetness honest, and the citrus oil cutting the whole thing at the end.

It is not on the current list. It also turned out to matter later, because it was already running when Kirishima asked me to build them some cocktails, and wanting to go the opposite direction from it is how Red Dragon Juice started.

Menus move. That one is worth writing down anyway.

What to Ask For

Ask whoever is behind the bar what has miso in it that week, because the answer changes.

If you like a drink that is savoury and rich without being sweet, say that, and mention you have read this. That is enough to get you pointed at the right glass.