Outside the south南九州以外
The exceptions, and what they tell you about the rule.
26 bottles here · 13 producers · Shochu, Kome (rice)
Almost every prefecture in Japan is licensed to make shochu and most of them barely do. The bottles in this catalogue from outside Kyushu and Okinawa are worth understanding as exceptions rather than as a northern tradition, because each one exists for a specific reason.
Several are kasutori shochu from sake breweries: a brewery presses its sake, is left with lees, and distils them. That is why Yamaguchi, Niigata and Yamagata appear here at all. The spirit carries the aroma of the sake it came from, which is the point of it.
Some are korui shochu, the continuously distilled class, which is made industrially and is not tied to any region. Mie appears here for that reason and not because it has a shochu tradition.
And a few are genuinely local: shiso shochu from Hokkaido, made with red perilla from Shiranuka, is a flavoured spirit built on neutral base alcohol rather than a honkaku shochu, and is the best known of its kind in Japan.
Producers here
- Takara Shuzo9 bottles · Official site
- Asahi Shuzo4 bottles · Official site
- Nakano BC4 bottles
- Hakkaisan Brewery Co.3 bottles
- Tatenokawa3 bottles
- Godo Shusei2 bottles · Official site
- Kiuchi Brewery2 bottles
- Miyazaki Honten2 bottles
- Aoki Shuzo1 bottle
- Chiyomusubi Sake Brewery Co.1 bottle
- Chiyomusubi Shuzo1 bottle
- Nissin Shurui1 bottle
- Ozeki Corporation1 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.
