Nikaido Shochu: The Oita Distillery That Made Barley Koji Work

Oita is barley country. If you drink shochu in Japan and someone hands you something light, clean and faintly sweet, there is a good chance it came from Oita and a good chance the reason traces back to one family in a town called Hiji.

The Thing They Changed

Shochu is fermented with koji, and koji has to grow on a grain. For most of shochu's history that grain was rice, no matter what the spirit was actually made from. A barley shochu would be barley fermented with rice koji. The rice was in there doing work, and you could taste it.

Nikaido Shuzo has been in Hiji since 1866, trading under the name Kiwaya. Wartime controls on barley were lifted in 1951, and that is the year the sixth-generation head, Akira Nikaido, took over as toji and started trying to grow koji on barley instead of rice.

It took him twenty-two years. The all-barley shochu was finished in 1973 and went on sale in 1974, with barley as the base and barley as the koji and nothing else in the bottle. It was the first shochu in Japan made that way.

That sounds like a small change. It is not. Growing koji on barley is harder than growing it on rice, and what you get back is a spirit that tastes like one thing instead of two. The barley sweetness stops being a note and becomes the whole structure.

Why It Tastes So Soft

The other half of it is how they distil. Nikaido uses vacuum distillation, which lowers the pressure in the still so the wash boils around 40 to 50 degrees instead of near 100. The heavy compounds never come across. What you lose is funk and what you keep is sweetness and clarity. If you want the longer version of why that matters, it is in our guide to reading a shochu label.

Put the two together, all barley and distilled cold, and you get the profile Oita became famous for.

The Boom

They put the family name on a bottle in 1974. It sold far beyond Oita, then far beyond Kyushu, and the mugi shochu boom that followed reshaped what the rest of Japan thought shochu was. Before that, shochu mostly meant sweet potato and mostly meant a regional drink your grandfather liked. Nikaido is a large part of why that changed.

The method stayed in the family. They have never brought in an outside toji. The heir learns it and the heir makes it, which is unusual at this scale and is the sort of thing that either produces something very consistent or falls apart. Sixty years on it has not fallen apart.

How to Drink It

Cold water, roughly half and half, is the way this is drunk in Oita and it is the way I would start. The barley sweetness opens up and the spirit does not fight you.

On the rocks works. Hot water works in winter and pushes the grain aroma up out of the glass. As a highball with soda and a squeeze of citrus it disappears into a meal, which is a compliment.

It goes with anything off the grill. Yakitori, pork belly, fish. It is a good first shochu for someone who thinks they do not like shochu, because there is nothing in it to get past.