Sudachi Shochu: The Citrus Tokushima Grows and Nobody Exports

Some drinks reward you for thinking about them. This one rewards you for being thirsty.

What Sudachi Actually Is

Sudachi is a small green Japanese citrus, and Tokushima prefecture grows effectively all of it. It is a point of local pride there in a way that is hard to overstate, and the tree appears on the prefecture's own promotional material.

Two things people get wrong about it.

It is not a lime. It looks like one, it is picked green like one, and it is not one. Sudachi is closer to yuzu in ancestry, and where a lime is mostly sharp, sudachi has an aromatic, slightly bitter, almost herbal quality in the peel that lime does not have at all.

And green is not unripe. Sudachi is harvested green deliberately, because that is when the aroma is at its peak. Left on the tree it turns yellow and loses most of what makes it interesting. The whole crop is picked against the clock.

In Tokushima it goes on everything. Grilled fish, soba, miso soup, sashimi, matsutake. It is squeezed the way other places reach for lemon, and it is used for aroma more than acidity.

What Nissin Shurui Does With It

This is shochu with sudachi juice in it, and it keeps the fruit's bitterness rather than sanding it off, which is the decision that makes it work. Straight citrus sweetness gets boring in about three sips. The faint bitter edge is what keeps you going back.

The base is light and the ABV sits well below whisky, so it drinks long without accumulating on you.

It also appears on our list as Awa no Kaori, which is the full name it carries in Japan. Awa is the old province name for Tokushima, so the bottle is announcing where the fruit is from before it says anything else.

How to Drink It

Cold, and colder than you think. This is one of the few drinks where temperature is doing real work, because the aromatic compounds in citrus peel read as sharp and clean when cold and as slightly syrupy when they warm up.

Soda highball is the best version. On the rocks is fine. Cut with cold water if you want it gentler.

What to Eat With It

Anything fried or salty. Karaage above all, because the citrus does exactly to fried chicken what a squeezed wedge of sudachi would do, except it arrives already in the glass.

If somebody in your group says they do not like shochu, this is usually the bottle that turns out to be the exception.