Amami奄美群島
The only place in Japan allowed to distil shochu from brown sugar.
4 bottles here · 2 producers · Kokuto (brown sugar)
Kokuto shochu is made from kokuto, the unrefined black sugar of the Amami islands, and it may be made nowhere else in Japan. That is a matter of tax law rather than tradition. A spirit distilled from sugar is normally rum for tax purposes and taxed accordingly; the Amami islands were granted a standing exemption that lets sugar be used as a shochu base there, on the condition that rice koji is used alongside it.
That condition is the whole character of the category. A kokuto shochu is not rum: the koji step means it is fermented like a shochu and it comes out dry, with the sugar showing as aroma rather than as sweetness. The bottles in this catalogue run from around 24 percent to 43 percent, which is a wider spread than any other shochu category here, so they are not interchangeable with each other.
The islands are administratively part of Kagoshima prefecture but sit most of the way to Okinawa, and the category sits between the two in the glass as well.
Producers here
- Amami Oshima Kaiun Shuzo3 bottles
- Amami kokuto cooperative1 bottle
A producer is linked only where a page on their own domain was read while researching one of their bottles. The rest have no link rather than a guessed one.
