Why we built this
Because shochu deserves more drinkers than it has, and the way it is usually introduced is losing them.
Almost every introduction to shochu starts with a rule. Cut it with hot water, six parts to four, and pour the water first. Those serves are good, and this site says so on every bottle page where they belong. But leading with them asks a newcomer to learn a ritual before they are allowed to enjoy the drink, and most people politely decline and order something else.
The plainer argument is this. Shochu is a distilled spirit at roughly half the strength of vodka, with more flavour than most gin, and it is single-distilled so it still tastes of what it was made from. That is an easy thing to like. It does not need a ceremony attached to it.
The question we wanted answered
We run Izakaya Juraku, on the Lower East Side in New York. The question we get across the bar is never “what is shochu”. It is: I have this bottle, or you have just poured me this, so what do I do with it?
Nobody had written that down. There are excellent guides to what shochu is, several of them from the Japanese trade bodies, and there are importer catalogues with tasting notes. But almost nothing published anywhere connects a specific named bottle to what actually belongs in the glass with it, and says why. So we built that: 238 bottles from 87 producers, each scored against what it is made from, with the reasoning shown for every suggestion so you can disagree with it.
What we will not do
We do not lecture. Every recommendation carries its reasoning and you are invited to ignore it. Traditional serves appear as options with their reasons attached, never as gates.
We do not guess. Every fact on this site carries the page it came from, and where a producer and an importer disagree about a bottle’s strength, we print neither number and say so. An unknown left blank is more useful than a plausible invention, because these are claims about real products made by real people and they go out under a real restaurant’s name.
Producers and importers, talk to us
We would like to work with the people who make this. Not as advertising, which we do not sell, but because the catalogue is assembled from what importers publish, and what importers publish is often thinner and occasionally wronger than what the distillery knows.
Concretely, we would welcome any of the following.
- Corrections. If we have your koji, your strength, your prefecture or your distillery name wrong, tell us and it is fixed the same week. We publish what our sources said. We would rather publish what you say.
- Your own serving and mixing notes. If your distillery has worked out what its shochu does in a highball or a cocktail, we will quote it and link to you. Several producers publish this and almost nobody reads it in English.
- Photographs. Most bottle shots here are borrowed from importers and credited to them. We would rather use yours, credited to you.
- Bottles we are missing. Particularly outside Kagoshima, Miyazaki and Okinawa, where the US catalogue thins out and the map has gaps that are about importing rather than about what exists.
- Anything aimed at the US market. Since New York in 2022 and California in 2023, shochu at or below 24 percent can finally be sold under its own name rather than labelled soju. That changed the ground under this category here, and a lot of American drinkers still do not know the word.
We are a restaurant, not a publisher, so this is a slow and honest offer rather than a media kit. The fastest way to reach us is either of these.