How to Read a Shochu Label: Koji, Distillation, Ingredient

The first question I get about shochu is always what it is made from. Sweet potato, barley, rice, buckwheat.

It is a reasonable question and it is close to useless. Two sweet potato shochu can taste so unlike each other that you would not guess they shared an ingredient, and the reason is never the potato. There are two other things on that label doing far more work, and once you know them you can predict what is in the glass before you order it.

First: Is It Honkaku?

Japanese law splits shochu in two, and this is the split that matters most.

Korui shochu is column distilled, over and over, until almost nothing of the original ingredient survives. It is clean, neutral and cheap, and it exists to be mixed. Most canned chuhai in Japan is built on it. Nothing wrong with that, but the ingredient on the label is close to irrelevant, because the process has stripped it out.

Honkaku shochu, also called otsurui, is distilled once in a pot still. Once. Everything the ingredients and the fermentation produced is still in there, because there was no second pass to take it out.

That single distinction separates a spirit that tastes of something from a spirit engineered not to. Everything we pour is honkaku.

Second: Which Koji

This is the one almost nobody outside Japan knows to look for, and it decides more about the flavour than the base ingredient does.

Shochu is fermented with koji, the same mould used for sake, soy sauce and miso. It comes in three colours and they are not interchangeable.

Black koji was brought up from Okinawa, where it evolved for awamori in subtropical heat. It produces a lot of citric acid, which protects the ferment from spoiling in warm weather, and it gives a spirit with real depth and a sharp, clean edge. When a bottle puts kuro in its name, this is what it is advertising. Kuro Kirishima is exactly this, and the black in the name is the koji, not the potato.

White koji is a natural mutation of the black, discovered in the early twentieth century, and it took over most of the industry because it is easier to work with. It gives a softer, rounder spirit where the ingredient comes through gently rather than forcefully.

Yellow koji is the sake mould. It is fragile and it spoils easily in the south, which is why it mostly went out of use for shochu. A few producers still fight with it, because what it gives back is a floral, fruity, almost ginjo-like aroma you cannot get any other way. Tomino Hozan is made this way, and it is the reason that bottle smells like citrus rather than like a root vegetable.

Third: How It Was Distilled

Two ways, and they produce opposite results.

Atmospheric distillation is the traditional method, at normal pressure and high heat. Heavy aroma compounds carry over, and the spirit ends up rich, oily and unmistakably made of something.

Vacuum distillation lowers the pressure inside the still so the wash boils at 40 to 50 degrees instead of near 100. The heavier compounds never make the jump. What you get is light, soft, clean and fruity, with almost none of the funk.

This is why two sweet potato shochu from the same prefecture can taste like different categories. One was distilled hot and one was distilled cold.

Then, Finally, the Ingredient

Now the base matters, because you know what has been done to it.

Sweet potato is the loudest. Barley is lighter and nuttier. Rice sits closest to sake. Buckwheat is the gentlest of the lot. Brown sugar, made only in the Amami Islands, is clean and lightly sweet. And there is green tea, and sesame, and shiso, and a few others that exist mostly because somebody was curious.

How to Drink It

Neat or on the rocks if you want to taste what the label promised. Mizuwari, cut with cold water, is the everyday way in Japan and it opens up aromas that are locked shut at full strength. Oyuwari, with hot water, is the winter version, and it does something different again: warmth pushes the aroma up out of the glass before you drink it. Pour the hot water first, then the shochu, so it mixes on its own.

What We Pour

Our shochu list is one of the deeper ones in the city and it moves, so rather than print a list here that goes stale, it is on the menu with everything else.

If you are starting from nothing, tell whoever is behind the bar whether you want something loud or something quiet. That is genuinely all we need to point you at the right bottle.

And if the question you actually have is what to mix a bottle with, we built a separate site for that. Pick a shochu, find out what goes with it and why.