Gyokuro Excellent Green: A Shochu Distilled With Japan's Finest Green Tea

Green tea shochu exists, and most of it is flavored after distillation.

This one puts the tea into the process, and it uses gyokuro, which is the most expensive leaf in Japan.

What Gyokuro Is

Gyokuro is shade-grown. For a few weeks before harvest the plants are covered, which starves them of light and forces them to produce more chlorophyll and more theanine.

The result is intensely green, savory and umami-rich rather than astringent, the opposite of a brisk everyday sencha. It's a tea people brew at 50°C and sip in tiny amounts.

Distilling something that costly is not an obvious commercial decision.

Who Makes It

Kitaya, in Fukuoka, founded in 1820.

Regulars here may recognize the name, Kitaya also makes Hizo Otokoyama, the dry Fukuoka tokubetsu junmai on our sake list. This is the same house working in a completely different direction.

How It's Built

Gyokuro leaves distilled with Fukuoka-grown rice and yellow koji, the sake mold, not the black or white koji standard in shochu.

That's the same choice Nishi Shuzo makes for Tomino Hozan, and for the same reason: yellow koji gives a lighter, more fragrant result. On a raw material as delicate as gyokuro, anything heavier would bury it.

Aroma: Rich green tea, with seaweed and bergamot

Taste: Rich and mellow, savory, clearly tea

Finish: Smooth, reminiscent of green tea ice cream

The ice cream comparison comes up constantly and it's accurate. But there's no sugar in it, that impression is the tea's own sweetness and the texture, not sweetening.

How to Drink It

Cold. On the rocks, or mizuwari, which is closest to how you'd actually drink tea.

Soda is very good if you want it longer, and turns it into something like a dry green tea highball.

Skip hot water. Heat pushes the tea toward bitterness, the same way over-hot water ruins brewed gyokuro.

Pair It With

Delicate things it won't run over. Handrolls, crispy rice, agedashi tofu, seaweed salad, the seaweed note in the shochu and the seaweed on the plate meet directly.

It's also good after a meal in place of tea, which is more or less the joke.

Try It at Juraku

Gyokuro Excellent Green is on the shochu list at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side.