About

Shochu does not have a quality problem. It has a marketing problem, and you can hear it in the answer to the question we get asked most: what is this, and how do I drink it? The answer always begins “traditionally, you drink it…” and then a ritual. It is correct, and it is still the wrong thing to say first. Tell somebody there is a correct way to drink something they have never had, and what they hear is that it is not for them. So they order what they already know how to order.

So this starts where a new drinker already is: lychee, citrus, ginger, whatever they were going to order anyway, made with this instead. The catch is that honkaku shochu is distilled once, so the raw material is still in the glass. A clean rice shochu takes almost anything beside it. A heavy imo will fight a mixer chosen for it by analogy to vodka. Getting that wrong once teaches somebody they do not like shochu rather than that they made a bad drink, and closing that gap is the whole job of this site.

How it decides

There are 531 bottles here and 163 things to put in them. Every suggestion is scored in four layers: what that style of shochu wants in general, what the specific bottle’s flavours attract and repel, what its profile structurally needs, and hand corrections where a producer or a bartender has said something we should not argue with.

Every layer that moves a score has to supply the sentence explaining itself. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a feature: it means no suggestion appears without the sentence behind it, and it means that when a suggestion is wrong, the reasoning is right there to be disagreed with. If the reasoning does not convince you, ignore the suggestion. That is the correct response and we would rather you did that than trust it.

What it cannot do

It has never tasted anything. It is working from what producers and importers publish, from how shochu is commonly drunk, and, for the bottles we pour, from our own notes. It does not know what is in your kitchen, what you like, or that the bottle in your hand is from a batch that came out different.

Where a fact was not published, it is missing here rather than guessed. A bottle with no stated alcohol percentage shows no alcohol percentage. Where an importer’s page and the distillery’s give different strengths for the same bottle, and several do, neither number appears.

Where the recipes come from

For other people’s cocktails we publish the ingredients and specs and link the method, because an ingredient list is a list of facts and a written method is somebody’s writing. The person who developed the drink is credited on the first line of the card, above the recipe’s own title, and linked again at the foot of it. The bar’s own recipes are on izakayajuraku.com and are linked exactly like anyone else’s.

Most shochu has no cocktail written for it at all, which is most of the reason this site exists. Where that is true, the bottle page says so and asks you to write down what you made.

How the list is built, and checked

Most of what is here we read off the producers' own pages. At this size we do that reading with software, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise. A restaurant does not hand-collect five hundred bottles.

What the software brings back does not go up as it found it. Every figure has to come from a page we can link to, and tasting notes and producer descriptions are checked against that page before they're used.

When two sources disagree the higher one wins. The distillery first, then government and trade bodies, then the importer, then the distributor, then a shop. Shop listings copy each other and guess at the fields their template demands, so we treat them as unreliable. Every bottle page lists its sources, so you can see which kind you are reading.

Fixing a record is harder than adding one, because a wrong fix destroys a right answer. We put forty one proposed corrections through a second check recently and threw out twenty two. More than half were the same trap. A distillery's domestic bottle and the export bottle sold abroad are often different strengths, so the number that looked wrong was the right one.

Some mistakes the build refuses outright, so nobody has to remember them. A flavour tag that is really the koji. A count in a sentence the data disproves. One company under two names. An ingredient list sliced out of the middle of a sentence. A citation pointing at a search engine. Each of those got onto this site once. Each one now stops a release.

Telling us it is wrong

Every bottle page lists the sources it was built from. If a fact is wrong, or a pairing is nonsense, or you are a producer who would rather we did not use your photograph, the fastest route is the note box at the bottom of any bottle page, or email hello@izakayajuraku.com. Photographs are credited to whoever owns them and recorded with the page they came from, so removing one is a single edit.

Who made it

Izakaya Juraku, a Lower East Side izakaya at 121 Ludlow Street in New York. The 31 shochu on the counter are where this list started, and where the bottles marked tasted here got tasted. The rest of the list comes from what producers, importers and distributors publish, so that someone holding a bottle we do not stock still gets an answer. Each of those pages names the source its flavour profile came from and says whether that was the distillery, the importer or a shop.

What is in the list, and what is not

For a long time the answer was: whatever an American importer carries. That was never the intention, it was the shape of the research, and it made the catalogue a description of one country's import trade rather than of the drink. A distillery that sells only in Japan had no page here no matter how well it documents its own bottles, which is most of the distilleries in Kyushu, and a Japanese reader was being shown their own drink through a US customs form.

So a bottle is here if it is real and somebody has published the facts about it. Where we have found a US importer that is recorded on the bottle's page and there is a filter for it, because if you are standing in a shop in Ohio that is the question you are actually asking. It is a fact about the bottle now rather than the reason it exists here.