The Japanese Bitters: Bonito, Cherry Blossom, and a Mizunara Old Fashioned

One of these bitters is made from dried bonito, shiitake and kelp.

That is not a gimmick. It is dashi, more or less, turned into something you put in a drink.

Where They Came From

Yuki Yamazaki spent years in the spirits industry before starting The Japanese Bitters Company. The idea arrived at a charity event after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, where he served cocktails built from Japanese ingredients and realized nobody was making bitters that way.

In 2015 he went to the Netherlands to study at Herman Jansen, a distillery that has been running since 1777. He came back and spent two years getting the first three right, then partnered with Honbo Distillery to get a domestic production license.

The Four Bitters

• Umami — dried bonito, shiitake, kelp and yuzu, sous vide macerated. Savory, and strange in the best way. It does the obvious thing to a meaty drink and something much more interesting to a fruity one.
• Shiso — pungent and grassy, with basil, spearmint, cinnamon and a little anise underneath.
• Yuzu — fresh and dried peel from farms in Tokushima, the part of Japan people actually go to for yuzu.
• Sakura — Yaezakura blossoms from Nagano, with leaves from Shizuoka pickled in ocean salt. Floral and faintly saline, which is exactly what a salt-pickled cherry leaf tastes like.

All of them are 27% and built on neutral spirit distilled locally in Tokyo.

The Mizunara Liqueur

The same company also makes a liqueur, and it might be the most interesting thing they do.

Mizunara is the Japanese oak that whisky people talk about in reverent tones. Rare, slow-growing, and logged under government restriction to keep it from disappearing. Normally you meet it as a cask influence. Here you meet it directly.

It is only two ingredients: mizunara oak chips and yomogi, Japanese mugwort, each macerated separately for twenty-four hours and then blended. Sweetened with Okinawan kibizatou, a millet sugar. It comes in at 23%.

It smells like sandalwood, rosemary and white pepper with something piney behind it. It tastes like rhubarb, black tea, freshly cut lumber and brown sugar, and finishes on petrichor, spearmint and a little smoke.

The Old Fashioned

Our favorite thing to do with the Mizunara is put it in an old fashioned with Akashi Ume, the whisky that steeps green plums in barrels at a brewery that has been going since 1679.

Plum and oak and mugwort should not obviously work together. They do. The ume brings the fruit, the mizunara brings the wood without the drink ever tasting oaky, and the yomogi keeps a bitter edge running underneath so it does not go sweet.

Not On the Menu

None of these are on the cocktail list at the moment. That is not a slight on them. Bitters are a bartender's tool more than a menu item, and this range is the one we reach for when a drink needs to taste Japanese rather than just taste good.

If you like that idea, say so at the bar. It is the kind of request our bartenders enjoy.

Try Them at Juraku

We carry the full Japanese Bitters range at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side.