Kiuchi Rice Shochu: Distilled From Daiginjo Lees and Aged Ten Years

This is the third thing we pour from Kiuchi Brewery, and the least known of them.

Most people find Kiuchi through Hitachino Nest beer. Some find the sake, Kikusakari, which the brewery had been making for 173 years before the beer existed. Almost nobody arrives at the shochu.

What It's Made From

The base is spent grain from daiginjo sake production, the solids left after pressing the most highly polished class of sake.

Distilling from sake lees is a real tradition, called kasutori shochu. The lees still carry a lot of the aromatics of the sake that produced them, so you end up with a spirit that keeps some of the parent sake's fragrance instead of stripping it out.

Kiuchi is a sake brewery first. Using their own daiginjo lees rather than buying in neutral base material is what makes this specific rather than generic.

The Koji and the Aging

It's made with yellow koji, the sake koji, rather than the black or white koji that dominate shochu production.

Yellow koji is temperamental in shochu-making. It's less acidic, which makes fermentation more vulnerable, and it's part of why southern Kyushu moved to black and white koji in the first place. What it gives back is a gentler, more fragrant, more sake-like character.

Then it's matured for ten years and bottled at 41% ABV, which is a long way from the standard 25%.

What That Adds Up To

A rice shochu with the aromatic lift of a daiginjo underneath, ten years of resting to round it out, and enough strength to carry both.

At 41% this drinks closer to a whisky than to an everyday shochu, and it's priced and positioned accordingly.

How to Drink It

Neat, or with a single large rock. Treat it as an aged spirit.

Mizuwari works if you want it longer, but with ten years of maturation in the bottle we'd rather you met it undiluted first.

Pair It With

Delicate things that won't fight the fragrance. Handrolls, crispy rice, agedashi tofu, scallop skewers.

It also finishes a meal well on its own.

Try It at Juraku

Kiuchi Rice Shochu is on the shochu list at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. If you drink our Dassai Shochu, this is the other kasutori bottle on the list and the comparison is worth making.