Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Shōchū from Kyushu and awamori from Okinawa — distilleries and styles.
The smell hits first. Warm, yeasty, faintly sweet, like bread dough left to rise next to roasting sweet potatoes. Then the humidity, which clings to your shirt within seconds of walking in. Then the sound: the slow blub of moromi mash bubbling in clay pots the size of bathtubs, and somewhere behind a sliding door, … Read more
The first time I met someone who really knew awamori, his name was Tanaka and he was the kind of cellar guide who calls every barrel by its volume in kame, the earthenware jars Okinawan distillers have used for centuries. I was standing with him in the wooden cellar at Chuko Distillery in Tomigusuku, fifteen … Read more
How does a city smaller than Yokohama end up with the loudest, most stubborn street-food culture left in Japan? Fukuoka does it the same way it does everything else: late at night, on a stool that wobbles, with a paper lantern over your head and a bowl of pork-bone broth that came out of a … Read more
A bottle of shop-brand sake from a Tokyo supermarket runs ¥800 and clocks 15% alcohol. A bottle of honkaku shōchū from the shelf above it costs ¥1,500 and reads 25%. A bottle of 10-year aged Okinawan awamori two shelves down asks ¥6,800 and tips 43%. All three are made from rice or grain. All three … Read more