Cor Cor Red and Green: Japan's Rum From an Island 220 Miles Out to Sea

Minamidaito is a long way from anywhere. It sits in the Pacific well east of the main Okinawan islands, it was uninhabited until 1900, and its economy has been sugarcane for most of the time since.

In 2004, a company called Grace Rum started making rum there. It was the first rum in Japan made entirely from domestic ingredients.

The Founder

Grace Rum was founded by Yuko Kinjo, from Naha, who got the company off the ground through an internal venture program at Okinawa Electric Power, where she was working.

That is an unusual origin for a distillery, and it turned into a genuinely well-known Japanese story. The novelist Maha Harada wrote a novel based on it, "Kaze no Majimu," which was adapted into a film released in September 2025.

Two Rums, Two Raw Materials

This is the useful part, because the split between these two bottles is the single most important division in the entire rum category, and most people have never had it laid out.

Red Label is what the industry calls industriel, industrial rum. It is made from molasses, the by-product left over when a sugar mill refines cane into crystallized sugar. The overwhelming majority of the world's rum is made this way.

Grace Rum makes a specific point about this. Molasses has a strong flavor and aroma of its own, and the standard industry practice is to mask it with essences, meaning artificial flavoring, and caramel, meaning chemical coloring. Cor Cor uses neither. It is additive-free and uncolored, so what you get is the molasses itself.

Green Label is agricole, agricultural rum, made by pressing the cane and fermenting the fresh juice rather than the by-product.

Very few places in the world do this. Grace Rum names the company it keeps: the French overseas departments, principally Martinique and Réunion, and then Minamidaito Island out in the Pacific. An additive-free agricole is rarer still.

The catch with agricole is scheduling. Fresh cane juice starts degrading almost immediately after pressing, so it can only be made once a year, timed to the harvest. That also means each year tastes slightly different, which the producer treats as a feature rather than a problem.

Grace Rum notes that the cane is what survived the typhoons, and that it is hand-pressed stalk by stalk.

What They Taste Like

Red is the rounder of the two. Cane sweetness, tropical fruit, a little warm spice, and none of the flat caramel note you get from colored rum.

Green is the grassier one, and considerably more distinctive. Fresh cut cane, green vegetal notes, citrus, and a clean dry finish. If you have never had an agricole, it does not taste like what most people mean by rum. It tastes like the plant.

Both are 720ml at 40% ABV. Both are bottled and labeled entirely by hand, which is why production numbers stay small.

How to Drink Them

The producer's own advice, and it is good advice: try it straight or on the rocks before you reach for it as a cocktail base.

That is not precious. It is that both of these were made without the masking agents most rum relies on, so there is actually something to taste, and mixing straight into a cocktail skips past it.

Try It at Juraku

Cor Cor Red and Cor Cor Agricole are part of the rum selection at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. The agricole is made once a year in limited quantity, so check the current menu or ask the bar what is open.