Miyazaki宮崎県
The broadest range in Japan: sweet potato, barley, rice and buckwheat.
43 bottles here · 18 producers · Imo (sweet potato), Mugi (barley), Kome (rice), Soba (buckwheat)
Miyazaki makes more different kinds of shochu than any other prefecture. Sweet potato in the south where it borders Kagoshima, barley in the north, rice, and buckwheat in the mountains around Takachiho, where soba shochu was invented in the 1970s.
It is also where a particular idea of craft distilling took hold. Kuroki Honten grows its own barley and sweet potatoes and makes its koji by hand, and its Osuzuyama distillery, opened in 1998 up on Mount Osuzu for the water and the air, was built specifically to do that at a smaller scale. Watanabe, Yanagita and Furusawa work the same way, and several of the bottles in this catalogue are fermented with native yeast rather than a pitched strain, which is rare anywhere in Japanese distilling.
Hyakunen no Kodoku, from Kuroki Honten, is the bottle that changed what shochu could charge. A barrel-aged barley shochu at 40 percent released into a market that expected 25 percent and a plastic bottle, it named itself after the Garcia Marquez novel and proved there was an audience for shochu sold like whisky.
Producers here
- Kirishima Shuzo7 bottles · Official site
- Watanabe Distillery6 bottles
- Yanagita Distillery5 bottles · Official site
- Furusawa Distillery3 bottles
- Kuroki Honten Distillery3 bottles
- Osuzuyama Distillery3 bottles
- Kyoya Shuzo2 bottles
- Furusawa Jozo1 bottle
- Inoue Shuzo1 bottle
- Kagura Shuzo1 bottle
- Kuroki Honten1 bottle
- Nakamura Shuzojo1 bottle
- Ochiai Distillery1 bottle
- Rihei1 bottle
- Sakurano Sato Shuzo1 bottle
- Shoro Distillery1 bottle
- Unkai Shuzo1 bottle
- Watanabe Shuzojo1 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.
