Kumamoto熊本県
Kuma rice shochu, made in one river basin for five hundred years.
16 bottles here · 6 producers · Kome (rice)
Protected origin: Kuma球磨焼酎
Rice only, fermented with rice koji using groundwater from the Kuma district or Hitoyoshi city, then distilled in a pot still and bottled within that area.
Designated 1995 by Japan’s National Tax Agency. Source.
Kuma shochu is rice shochu from the Hitoyoshi basin, a valley closed in by mountains along the Kuma river in the south of Kumamoto. It has been made there since at least the sixteenth century and it is one of the four original protected names, designated in 1995.
The rule is strict in a way that is worth reading: not just rice, but rice fermented with the basin's own groundwater and bottled inside the same area. A rice shochu made two valleys over to an identical recipe cannot be called Kuma shochu.
The style is soft and clean, and because rice shochu has no potato or barley character to hide behind, this is the category where the distiller's choices are most exposed. Several of the Kumamoto bottles here are long-aged, some in clay, some in barrels of kokuji evergreen oak, which is a wood almost nobody outside this basin uses.
Producers here
- Sengetsu Shuzo4 bottles
- SG Shochu3 bottles
- Takahashi Shuzo3 bottles · Official site
- Toyonaga Distilling Company2 bottles
- Jufuku Shuzojo1 bottle
- Tsutsumi Shuzo1 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.