A Beginner's Guide to Shochu

“The first written record of shochu was actually graffiti on a temple,” Rule of Thirds partner George Padilla told me. “In the 1400s, some builders working on a temple had scrawled, in the wood, a snide comment about the high priest being stingy with his shochu. Fittingly, this is the first record of what is, still today, considered a blue-collar beverage in Japan.”

Japan’s oldest, most traditional alcoholic beverage, shochu is a clear, distilled spirit made from fermented, well, almost anything. “I’ve actually calculated this once,” Kyushu-based osteopathic researcher by day, Kanpai blogger by night Stephen Lyman said to me. “For all the different decisions made during the process, there are literally millions of styles of shochu you can make. The scope is enormous.”

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