Why we built this
Because shochu deserves more drinkers than it has, and the way it is usually introduced is losing them.
Shochu does not have a quality problem. It has a marketing problem, and you can hear it in the answer to the question we get asked most: what is this, and how do I drink it?
Everybody answers it the same way. “Traditionally, you drink it…” and then a ritual. Hot water, six to four, water in the glass first. Cold water. Over ice. The answer is correct. It is still the wrong thing to say first.
Not because the serves are bad. I drink imo on the rocks most nights, and mugi with oolong tea when I do not. But tell somebody there is a correct way to drink something they have never had, and what they hear is that it is not for them. So they order what they already know how to order.
So start where they already are. Lychee. Citrus. Ginger. The drink they came in for, made with this instead. That is not a compromise. It is the introduction that actually gets drunk.
The question we wanted answered
We run Izakaya Juraku, on the Lower East Side in New York, and the objection above is not to the serves themselves. It is to leading with them, and to what is missing after them.
There are excellent guides to what shochu is, several from the Japanese trade bodies, and importer catalogues carry tasting notes. Producers publish serves for their own bottles and some are very good. What we went looking for and did not find was one place that takes a named bottle, says what belongs in the glass with it, and shows the reasoning so you can disagree with it.
And here is the catch, which is the whole reason this site exists. Honkaku shochu is distilled once. The raw material is still in the glass. A clean rice shochu takes almost anything you put beside it. A heavy imo does not: it is sweet, it is earthy, and it will fight a mixer that was chosen for it by analogy to vodka. Mugi sits between them, and koji, strength and time in wood move all of it again. Get that wrong once and a newcomer does not conclude they made a bad drink. They conclude they do not like shochu.
So we built the thing that closes the gap: 531 bottles from 167 producers, each scored against what it is made from, with the reasoning shown for every suggestion so you can disagree with it.
Who it is for
Three people. Somebody with a bottle at home, given or bought on a whim, who wants to know what to do with it tonight. Somebody who wants to try shochu and cannot tell which of several hundred bottles to start with. And bartenders.
That last one shaped a lot of this. Shochu reaches most menus as a low-proof vodka substitute, rice or barley, and that is the one job where the base ingredient does not matter. It is also the least interesting thing shochu does. A bar ready to put an imo or a kokuto on the list needs to know what it fights with before a guest sends the first one back.
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 about the bottle. Who made it, where, from what, with which koji, at what strength: every one of those carries the page it came from. When two pages disagree, the one closer to the liquid wins, which means the distillery, then a government or trade body, then the importer, then a shop. Often it is not a disagreement at all, because the bottle sold in Japan and the bottle sold here are different products at different strengths and both pages are right about their own. Where it is a real conflict and nothing settles it, 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.
The suggestions are a different kind of claim, and it would be dishonest to dress them up as the same one. A pairing here is a starting point, not a citation. Most are worked out from what the bottle is documented to be: its base, its koji, its strength, its body, and the tasting notes its producer or importer published. Some come from having poured it. A few are the producer’s own serving notes, and those say so and link to them. None of the rest means a distillery endorses the drink. That is the reason the reasoning is printed under every suggestion instead of just the verdict: so a bartender can see which parts are facts about the bottle and which parts are us reasoning from them, and throw out the second half.
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 producers and importers publish, and what gets published 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. This list used to be limited to what an American importer carries, which meant a distillery that does not export was absent no matter how well it documents itself, and the gaps in the map were about importing rather than about what exists. That is no longer the rule. If you sell only in Japan and your own pages carry the koji, the strength and the base, that is enough and we would like to list you.
- 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.