Red Dragon Juice Had Two Other Names First

Red Dragon Juice is one of the drinks people order without reading the rest of the list, especially once it gets warm out. It has been called two other things, and neither of them was any good as a name.

It Started as Homework

A few years ago Kirishima asked me to come up with some cocktails built on their shochu.

I already had one. It was a yakiimo cocktail, roasted sweet potato, made with Kuro Kirishima, which is the heavier, earthier direction from that distillery. So for the second one I wanted to go the opposite way. Light, cold, refreshing, the kind of thing you drink outside.

That pointed straight at Aka Kirishima. Same distillery, completely different animal. It is made from Murasaki Masari, a purple sweet potato, and it comes out with a berry and strawberry character that most imo shochu does not have. If you want a sweet potato spirit that plays well with fruit, that is the bottle.

What I built was cranberry, yuzu, shiso, Aka Kirishima and Mio sparkling sake on top. These days the yuzu and shiso come from our house yuzu slushy, which is where they live now.

It was very good. It was also not finished, and I could not work out why.

Why I Kept Tasting It

Normally this part is quick. I taste something, I know what it needs, I fix it. This one I could not read.

Some of you know I had to stop drinking for health reasons. I make an exception for tasting, because that is the job. So I kept tasting.

Around the third one I noticed I felt extremely good.

That is the thing about this drink and I want to be straight about it. Mio is 5% ABV, closer to beer than to sake, so the top of the glass is doing nothing to warn you. The cranberry and the yuzu are sweet and sharp. It is cold and it is fizzy. Every part of it is hiding a full pour of 25% shochu underneath. It does not taste strong. It arrives later.

I was working on it at the bar with some regulars around when this became visible to everyone, and one of them said we should call it Kiyo's Giggle Juice.

The First Rename

That was funny, and it was also not available. We already had the Kiyo Special on the menu and one drink with my name on it is plenty.

So it became Mio's Giggle Juice, after the sparkling sake sitting on top of it.

The Part I Had Wrong

Matt from Cocktail Omakase used to come in for highballs and a few bites. I gave him one and told him I was about 95% happy with it and something was missing.

He said, straight away, add a twist to it.

Grapefruit. That was the whole fix.

Here is the part worth knowing, because it is the reason I could not find it myself. A twist is not decoration and it is not juice. You express the peel over the surface of the drink so a fine spray of citrus oil lands on top, and you get that in your nose before the liquid ever reaches your mouth. Grapefruit oil is faintly bitter and a little resinous, which is exactly what a sweet fizzy drink has none of.

I had spent weeks trying to fix the drink by changing what was in it. The thing it needed was not in the glass. It was above the glass.

The Second Rename

Now it worked, and it sold, particularly in the summer.

The name kept getting in the way. Mio's Giggle Juice does not tell you anything unless somebody stands there and explains it, and on a busy night nobody is doing that.

Then we catered the bar for a mahjong party. I made a set of new cocktails on a mahjong theme for it and put the giggle juice back to work under a new name: Red Dragon Juice. In mahjong the red dragon is the 中 tile, one of the three dragons alongside white and green, and it is a tile people recognize on sight.

It outsold everything else at that event. The name stuck immediately, and the best thing about it was that nobody needed the story.

Which it turns out I have now told anyway.