What Is Shochu? The Three Questions We Get Asked Most

Shochu is the deepest part of our list and the part guests are least sure about. Three questions come up constantly. Here are the short answers, then the reasons.

Is it like sake? Sake can be shochu. Shochu is not sake.

Is it like vodka? Similar idea, except shochu is distilled once and vodka is distilled over and over.

Is it like soju? Not really, and most soju is closer to vodka than to shochu.

Now the detail.

What Shochu Is

A distilled Japanese spirit. The kind worth drinking is honkaku shochu, and two things define it.

It is fermented with koji. Yeast eats sugar, but grain is starch, so something has to bridge the gap. Western distillers malt the barley so it makes its own enzymes. Japan grows a mould on steamed grain and lets the mould do that job instead. It happens in a hot, humid room we wrote about here.

It is distilled once, in a pot still. Everything the ingredient and the ferment produced is still in the bottle, because there was no second pass to remove it.

Usually around 25%. Made from sweet potato, barley, rice, buckwheat, brown sugar and a long list of other things the law specifically permits.

Sake Can Be Shochu. Shochu Is Not Sake.

That is the sentence I keep coming back to, because it holds the whole relationship.

Sake is brewed. Shochu is distilled. Brewing gets you to roughly 15 to 20%. Distilling takes a finished ferment and concentrates it. In method, sake is closer to beer than to anything on the spirits shelf.

Distillation only runs one direction. You can take something brewed and distil it. You cannot un-distil a spirit back into a brew.

And that is not a thought experiment. Dassai Shochu is made by distilling Dassai's own sake lees, fresh the day they are pressed. Same brewery, same rice, same water.

They are very different drinks, but they are not strangers. The same clean floral character runs through both, because it started in the same place, and preserving it is the entire reason the lees go into the still while they are still fresh. The brewery bottles it at 39% because they believe that strength shows those aromas best.

That is the thing worth tasting. Distillation changes the form completely and still carries the family resemblance across.

The two also treat the grain in opposite ways. Sake rice is polished hard, often to 50% or less, to strip the outside and reach the starchy core. Rice shochu leaves most of the grain intact.

If you drink sake and have never had shochu, the Dassai is the shortest bridge across.

Like Vodka, But Distilled Once

This one is right in spirit and backwards in detail.

The repetition is not a stylistic choice, it is the legal definition. In the US, vodka is a neutral spirit, and neutral spirits have to be distilled to at least 190 proof, which is 95% alcohol. You cannot get there in one pass. Then it is cut back with water and bottled at 80 proof or above.

Shochu goes through the still once, at around 25%, and keeps what it arrived with.

So the honest version of the answer is that both are distilled, and vodka is distilled far harder. Stripping character out is the job.

The clearest proof of that is a pair of bottles on our own back bar. Oka Vodka comes from Tsutsumi Distillery in Kumamoto, in the Hitoyoshi Basin, five kilometres from the Kuma River. Tsutsumi has been making shochu there for close to a hundred and fifty years, and is one of only twenty-eight distilleries certified to produce Kuma shochu.

Their vodka is rice, fermented with sake brewer's yeast, and distilled five times in a copper-lined pot still. Then filtered through binchotan charcoal.

Same grain as a rice shochu. Same region. Same building. Even the same kind of still, since they use a pot rather than a column. What separates them is that the vodka goes through it five times instead of once, and then through charcoal on the way out.

Our Kiuchi Rice Shochu Ginka goes the opposite direction: one pass, then ten years in the warehouse building up more of exactly what those five passes and that charcoal remove.

Same material, same distillery tradition, opposite goal. Two glasses and you have it.

Soju Is a Different Question

We do not pour soju, so this is context rather than a recommendation. It is also the comparison people get most wrong, partly because the two names really are related.

Chinese shaojiu, Japanese shochu and Korean soju come from one root, all of it meaning something close to burned liquor, a reference to distillation. Same word, three countries, three different drinks.

Four things separate soju from shochu.

The starter. Japan uses koji: one chosen mould, deliberately grown on steamed grain in a controlled room. Korea traditionally uses nuruk, wheat or barley pressed into cakes and left to catch whatever wild yeasts, moulds and bacteria are in the air. A chosen culture against a caught one.

The number of distillations. Honkaku shochu is distilled once. Soju is typically multi-distilled, and most of what sells today is spirit taken up near neutral and then diluted back down.

The strength. Most soju on a shelf is 20% or below. Honkaku shochu sits around 25%. Traditional pot-distilled soju still exists and runs 40% and up, which is a genuinely different drink that happens to share a name with the green bottles.

What may be added, and this is the sharpest one. Japanese law does not permit additives in honkaku shochu. No sugar, no flavouring, no colouring. The base ingredient, koji, yeast and water. Soju carries no such restriction, and mass-market brands routinely contain sweeteners: sugar, stevia, sucralose and others.

So if soju reads slightly sweet to you and shochu does not, that is not your palate. One of them is allowed to add sugar and the other is not.

How to Order It

Start with a rice shochu, then mugi, then work your way up. Imo is the loud one and it is easier to like once you have the other two behind you.

If you want the sake comparison in one sitting, the Dassai does it. If you want the vodka one, order Oka Vodka next to a rice shochu.

And if someone tells you shochu is Japanese vodka, it is the other way round. Vodka is the one built to taste of nothing.