Ryukyu Ohcho: The Miyakojima Awamori Aged in a Cave

We have added Ryukyu Ohcho to the awamori list at $7 an ounce. It is the first bottle we have poured from Miyakojima, which is worth explaining, because Okinawa is not one place.

A Different Island

Miyakojima sits roughly 300 kilometres southwest of Okinawa's main island, closer to Taiwan than to Naha. It is flat, it is made of raised coral limestone, and it has no rivers worth the name. Water goes straight down through the rock rather than running across it.

Every other awamori we pour comes from somewhere else in the chain: Zuisen and Chuko from the main island, Kumesen from Kumejima, Seifuku from the Yaeyama group. They are not interchangeable, and treating "Okinawan awamori" as one category is like treating Scotch as one flavour.

Taragawa

Taragawa has been distilling in Miyakojima City since 1948, and their whole identity is built around kusu, aged awamori.

Their line on it is that awamori is not something you make, it is something you raise. That is easy to say and harder to run a business on, because aged stock is inventory you are not selling.

They also age in a cave. There is a limestone cave storehouse on the site that visitors can walk through, and rock like that gives you what a warehouse struggles to: a temperature that barely moves across a year, and humidity that stays put. On an island where the summer is brutal, that is not decoration.

What "Kusu Base" Means

Here is the part that makes this bottle interesting rather than just pleasant.

Awamori aged three years or more is called kusu. Most standard, everyday awamori is not kusu. It is young spirit, bottled soon after distillation, sharp and direct and priced accordingly.

Ryukyu Ohcho is blended on a base of kusu instead. The aged stock is the foundation rather than a garnish, which is unusual at the price and is where the roundness comes from. You get the florality awamori is known for on the nose, and then something with weight behind it instead of the hot edge a young bottle gives you.

If you want the wider explanation of what awamori is and why it uses Thai rice and black koji, that is in our guide to awamori.

How to Drink It

On the rocks is how it is drunk on the island and it is the right starting point. The dilution opens the aromatics without flattening them.

Mizuwari, cut with cold water, if you want it longer. In Okinawa this is traditionally mixed ahead of time and left to sit rather than stirred to order, which genuinely changes it.

Neat if you want to see what the aged base is doing, and this is a bottle where that is worth doing at least once.

It goes with grilled pork, anything fried, and sharp pickles. Awamori has more than enough structure to sit beside strong food without disappearing.

At $7 an ounce it is also the cheapest way on our list to find out whether you like aged awamori, which is the actual reason to order it.