Katana Shots: How We Built a Shot Ski Out of a Sword

I was scrolling Instagram and a shot ski went past. Four shot glasses fixed to a ski, four people lift it together, everyone drinks at once.

It looked fun. That was the whole reaction. Then the second thought arrived, which is the one I have about most things: how would we make that Japanese?

The Skiing Detour

The funny part is that a ski is not actually a bad starting point. Japan has some of the best skiing anywhere, the powder up north is famous enough that people fly in for it specifically, and anybody who skis already knows this.

But that is the catch. Skiers know. Everyone else does not, and a Japanese shot ski would read as a ski that happened to be in a Japanese bar. The reference has to land in about one second across a crowded room, or it is not a reference.

A sword lands in one second.

The Part Where It Has to Be Safe

Good idea, immediate problem.

A katana is a metal blade with an edge on it. Handing that to four people who are about to drink is not a thing I am going to do, and no amount of it looking cool changes the arithmetic.

So I started buying practice swords, in a few different materials, to find out which one could actually take the job. What I landed on was a wooden one. It has the shape and the weight and the silhouette, and there is nothing on it that can cut anybody.

The Actual Build

This is where it stopped being an idea and became a weekend.

The shot glasses needed holders, and the holders needed to be silicone: it grips the glass, it has some give, and it does not shatter when the whole thing gets set down hard, which it will.

Then there was the question of getting silicone to stay on wood, which was the real problem.

First the wood had to stop being round. A bokken is curved and rounded along its length, which is correct for a sword and useless for mounting anything flat. So I took my Milwaukee sander to it and cut a flat along the blade for the cups to sit on.

Then the bond. Silicone is notoriously unwilling to stick to things, and most epoxies that love wood want nothing to do with it. Finding one that would hold both took a fair amount of reading, and then a fair amount of gluing things and pulling them apart to see whether they held.

Hours of trial and error, and eventually a thing that works and keeps working, which is the only test that counts for something four people are going to yank off a bar.

The Shot Itself

The other half of this is what goes in the glasses, and I had opinions from the wrong end of the bar.

In my twenties and thirties, the shot a bartender bought you was usually bad well mezcal or Fernet. Both are punishment. You do the face, everybody laughs, and the actual experience is something you endured rather than enjoyed.

I did not want to build a whole thing and then put punishment in it.

So it is Oka yuzu vodka. Rice based, with yuzu macerated into it, from the distillery down in Kumamoto. It is still a shot, so you are going to taste it going down, and I am not pretending otherwise. But it is a pleasant thing to taste rather than something to survive.

On Being a Party Pooper

Somebody commented on our Instagram that it is just a shot on a stick.

Fair. It is a shot on a stick.

It is also four people having to lift something together, count together and drink together, which is more than most drinks ask of anybody. Two people minimum. Come and be silly with your friends and put it in your stories.