Scarlet Peach Amaro: Proofed Down With Peach Juice Instead of Water

Almost every spirit on the back bar gets cut with water somewhere in its making.

This one gets cut with peach juice.

The Peaches

Three varieties, Hakuho, Natsukko and Akatsuki, hand-harvested at YJ Peach Farm in Yamanashi, about a hundred kilometres west of Tokyo.

Hand-harvested is doing some work in that sentence. Founder Tatsuya "Moto" Motonaga brings in a team of roughly one hundred volunteers to pick and press them. It is a seasonal, genuinely impractical way to make a liqueur, and it only happens when the fruit is ready.

The pressed juice is then used to proof the aromatized spirit down to strength, in place of water. That is the whole idea. Nothing is diluted; it is diluted with more flavor.

The Botanicals

Over twenty-seven of them, macerated in a neutral sugarcane spirit.

Alongside the peach: bergamot peel, orange peel, raspberry leaf, rooibos, black cumin, passionflower, palo santo, coriander, lemongrass, lemon basil, sage, marjoram, and wakoucha, which is Japanese black tea.

Sweetening is honey, Japanese beet sugar and refined cane sugar rather than a single syrup.

The Distillery

Iseya sits in a hundred-year-old house that Motonaga renovated in Kanagawa, a couple of kilometres from Lake Sagami. He founded it in 2021, after a bartending career in Osaka and Tokyo and a research trip through roughly seventy European distilleries.

He rents the neighboring farmland and grows a lot of the botanicals himself, mugwort and wormwood among them, without pesticides. Everything is small batch, hand-blended and hand-bottled, with no automation. Even the color is done the old way, with natural cochineal.

Scarlet was the first Japanese amaro line to be commercially packaged and exported.

What It Tastes Like

Vibrant and juicy, in the way a tree-ripened peach at peak season is juicy, with a herbal complexity running underneath that keeps it from reading as sweet.

At 19% ABV it is notably lighter than most amari, which usually sit in the twenties or thirties. That makes it far more sessionable than the category normally allows.

How to Drink It

We pour it on its own. The Aperitivo is the only Scarlet on our cocktail menu at the moment, in the Negroni, and the rest of the range we serve neat. These are bottles worth meeting undiluted.

The low strength is what makes that work. At 19% this is a glass you can sit with, which is not something you can say about most amari.

Pair It With

Fried and salty, or the end of the meal.

Karaage and shake shake fries on one side, or a slow drink after oden or kakuni on the other. Stone fruit and herbal bitterness work in both directions.

Try It at Juraku

Scarlet Peach Amaro is on the bar at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side, alongside the rest of the Scarlet range.