Each autumn on the Mars Tsunuki distillery in Kagoshima, Japan, the shochu fermentation room fills with savory aromas of koji-laced candy potato rising from symmetrical rows of 120-year-old clay pots. On the distillery, generations of the Hombo household have been producing Japan’s native spirit for the reason that 1900s, although shochu’s historical past stretches again not less than 400 years. “Hardly anybody drinks shochu neat,” our tour information explains once I ask about conventional serves for the distillate. “As an alternative, you at all times drink it with water—whether or not that’s chilly water, scorching water, on the rocks or as a highball, typically as a citrusy highball.”
The latter beverage, known as a chu-hai—a mashup of “shochu” and “highball”—combines shochu with soda and a flavoring ingredient akin to tea, syrup or juice. A staple in Japanese izakayas for the reason that postwar years, when mass-produced shochu (known as korui) benefited from further taste to masks its low high quality, chu-hai is now ubiquitous throughout Japan in each à la minute and canned kinds. With a demure low-proof character (shochu is often bottled someplace between 20 and 30 p.c ABV), inexpensive value level and limitless alternatives for personalisation, the refreshing highball is more and more discovering its footing at stateside bars, too, leading to a constellation of variations touchdown on menus from coast to coast.
At Umami Mart, a store and tasting room in Oakland, California, co-owner Kayoko Akabori sells a number of completely different canned chu-hai flavors along with providing a housemade yuzu model throughout a weekly instructional sequence, known as Shochu’sday. “In Japan, should you have been to order a chu-hai, it could often be a bit of citrus and a bit of little bit of sugar and membership soda, however there’s a ton of room for interpretation as a result of it’s a very broad class,” says Akabori. Shochu itself will be made out of any one in all 54 authorised substances—barley, candy potato, rice and buckwheat are the most typical—with the accompanying flavoring choices additionally working the gamut. “It simply must be shochu and soda, however it doesn’t need to be a wedge of lemon and sugar; it may even have matcha or hojicha syrup in it.”
In some circumstances, U.S. bars function simple variations of the drink as a gateway for newcomers to get acquainted with the class. At Bar Goto in New York Metropolis, for instance, the Lemon Chu-Hai options kome (rice) shochu, lemon and soda water. It’s a snappy glass of sunshine that may simply attract a Tom Collins or vodka-soda fan. “Whereas the lemon chu-hai might be the most typical [in Japan], historically there are different savory chu-hai that use issues like umeboshi and shiso,” says Koharu Usui, a bartender at Bar Goto Niban.
As a part of her Shochu Sunday sequence, Usui—whose household is from Kyushu, the place the vast majority of shochu is produced—options about two dozen sorts of shochu, served by the flight or in one of many aforementioned conventional serves, plus a menu of 5 rotating chu-hai. A few of her favourite variations embody one that includes a salted pink shiso shrub made with rice vinegar and a contact of sugar, and one other made with tea-infused barley shochu, apple juice and soda. “Chu-hai are a good way for a bar to focus on sure traits of a [shochu], and likewise make it simpler for individuals to begin ingesting it,” she says. “Most shochu is lower-ABV, and by additional diluting it, you’re making the right session drink. It’s actually a spirit meant for ingesting with meals, very similar to wine, and can carry you thru an entire meal.”
Shochu training can also be a main purpose for the bar at Rule of Thirds in Brooklyn, New York, the place co-founders Brian Evans and George Padilla have developed an ordinary home combination of soda, grapefruit and hojicha syrup that acts as a unifying backdrop for various iterations of the spirit. “Thus far, we haven’t discovered a shochu that the blueprint didn’t work with,” says Evans. “It’s superior for company to come back in and have the identical chu-hai spec with three or 4 completely different shochus, as a result of they every provide completely completely different taste experiences,” he says. “For those who’re usually a vodka drinker, for instance, I’ve an approachable, less-intrusive white koji rice shochu, but when somebody says ‘I’m a whiskey drinker,’ there’s a roasted barley shochu that tastes as weighty as a single malt Scotch.”
For essentially the most half, stateside chu-hai are made with honkaku shochu, which is taken into account superior to the mass-produced korui class, as a result of it’s distilled solely as soon as to let the flavour of the uncooked materials shine. As creator and Honkaku Spirits ambassador Stephen Lyman famous at a panel throughout this yr’s Bar Convent Brooklyn, about 100 manufacturers of honkaku shochu can be found within the U.S. now, making elevated variations of this informal highball a possible choice for bartenders throughout the nation.
Julia Momosé of Kumiko in Chicago is one such bartender benefiting from the number of shochu choices now out there within the U.S. market. At Kumiko’s downstairs whiskey and shochu bar, she serves cassis and soda with oolong-infused candy potato shochu in the summertime, and the identical combo with scorching water (often known as oyuwari) within the winter. Upstairs on the important bar, she additionally provides the Lemon Togarashi chu-hai, made with barley shochu and lemon cordial, served with a rim of salt, sugar and shichimi togarashi. “I preserve the shochu within the freezer—the lemon cordial is kind of spherical, so it’s extra of a textural highball, nonetheless very refreshing, however there’s a roundness to the palate, which is distinctive,” she says.
For Momosé, the chu-hai strikes the right steadiness between conventional and approachable. “It’s a easy and integral a part of Japanese ingesting tradition,” she says, “whether or not it’s a canned chu-hai from a merchandising machine or 7-Eleven or getting chu-hai at an izakaya—it’s such a basic.”
