Shochu that goes with hoppy (beer-taste mixer)
Bubbles
Hoppy Beverage Co. has made it in Tokyo since 1948; at 0.8 percent it is legally a soft drink, and it is hard to find outside Japan. Chill the bottle, the shochu and the mug and no ice is needed.
Best bottles for hoppy (beer-taste mixer)
The strongest matches in the catalogue, across every style. Everything below is the same ranking opened out by what the shochu is made from.
Hoppy (beer-taste mixer): The distilleries themselves now sell imo shochu as a highball. Soda lifts the aroma off the glass instead of burying it.
sweet potato, rice, light-bodied, clean
sweet potato, rice, pear, grassy
Hoppy (beer-taste mixer): These bottles already have one strong flavour in them. Soda gives it room instead of competing with it.
sesame, nutty, toast, off-dry
sweet potato, floral, clean, sweet
umami, smooth, light-bodied, koji
sweet potato, light-bodied, sweet, koji
sweet potato, rice, clean, sweet
citrus, clean, bright
molasses, barley, savory, clean
shiso, light-bodied
Grouped by what the shochu is made from, because that is the level the reasoning works at: what this does to an imo shochu is a fact about imo shochu rather than about one bottle. Within each style, the strongest matches and anything poured at our bar come first. The ranking is the same engine that recommends a mixer from a bottle, run the other way round.
Imo shochu
The distilleries themselves now sell imo shochu as a highball. Soda lifts the aroma off the glass instead of burying it.
55 more, all of them in Imo shochu
Shiso, sesame, tea and other single-botanical shochu
These bottles already have one strong flavour in them. Soda gives it room instead of competing with it.
22 more, all of them in Shiso, sesame, tea and other single-botanical shochu
Mugi shochu
The barley highball is the default shochu drink in Japan. Clean spirit, cold soda, nothing in the way.
31 more, all of them in Mugi shochu
Awamori
The awamori highball is how Okinawa drinks through a summer, and it is the easiest introduction to the category.
12 more, all of them in Awamori
Soba shochu
Soba shochu is usually vacuum distilled and light, which is exactly the profile a highball flatters. The soba highball is a standard order in a soba restaurant, not an experiment.
Kome shochu
9 more, all of them in Kome shochu
Kokuto shochu
3 more, all of them in Kokuto shochu