Strawberry no Shinigami: A Bourbon Smash Built on a Bleach Pun

Some drinks start from a flavour idea. This one started from a pun, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The Joke

The protagonist of Bleach is Ichigo Kurosaki, and he is a Shinigami, a death god.

Ichigo also means strawberry.

That is it. That is the whole thing. Once you have noticed it you more or less have to make a strawberry drink called Strawberry no Shinigami, and given what is on the projector here most nights, nobody was going to talk me out of it.

The Drink

Syndicate Distillers Hudson Region 845 bourbon, yuzu, fresh strawberries, shiso leaf, and Japanese simple syrup. A smash, so the fruit and the herb get worked in the glass rather than arriving as a syrup.

The build is doing something specific. Bourbon brings caramel and vanilla, which is sweetness on top of sweetness once you add strawberries, and that combination goes cloying fast. Yuzu is the correction. It is sharper and more aromatic than lemon, and it cuts the sugar without flattening the fruit.

Shiso is what makes it interesting rather than merely good. It is a mint relative with a cooling, faintly medicinal edge, and against strawberry it does the same job basil does in an Italian kitchen. Everybody knows strawberry and basil works. Almost nobody has tried strawberry and shiso, and it is better.

Syndicate is from the Hudson Valley, which is not Japanese and is not pretending to be. We pour a fair amount of New York spirits alongside the Japanese ones, and this is a drink where the American base is doing work a Japanese whisky would not do as well.

Ask For It

It is a warm-weather drink and it comes and goes with the strawberries.

If it is not on the list when you come in, ask anyway. Somebody behind the bar knows how to build it.