About
Shochu almost always gets introduced as a set of rules. Six parts hot water to four parts spirit, water in the glass first, and so on. Those serves are genuinely good, and this site says so on every bottle page. But leading with them asks someone to learn a ritual before they are allowed to enjoy the drink, and most people quietly decline the offer.
Shochu is a distilled spirit at roughly half the strength of vodka, carrying more flavour than most gin. That makes it one of the better cocktail bases sold in this country, and it is sitting on shelves being described as a thing you drink with hot water. This site is the argument against that, in the only form that actually persuades anyone, which is a drink they liked.
How it decides
There are 141 bottles here and 118 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 there is no unexplained number anywhere on the site, 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 these bottles are actually drunk in Japan, and from the notes of people who have poured them. 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. Two of the bottles on this site have a strength printed on their importer's page that contradicts the distillery's, so neither number appears.
Where the recipes come from
We link to other people's cocktails and do not reproduce them. Somebody worked those drinks out and the traffic should go to them. The exception is the bar's own recipes, which are published on izakayajuraku.com and linked the same way as 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.
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. There are thirty three shochu on the counter, which is where this list started and where the bottles marked poured here got tasted. The rest of the list comes from what US importers and distributors publish, so that someone holding a bottle we do not stock still gets an answer. Those pages say plainly that nobody here has tasted them, and their flavour profiles are estimates built from the importer's own notes rather than from a glass.