One of Nankai Shochu’s biggest goals is to create more awareness around shochu, including its capabilities in cocktail recipes. Recently and to our great excitement, Food & Wine featured Nankai Shochu as a recommended base for making cocktails.
Shochu as a category is hard to summarize to bartenders because as a single-distilled spirit, the source grain greatly alters the experience. As the article notes, sweet potato shochus are earthy and robust while rice shochus are delicate. However, black sugar shochus, like Nankai’s vacuum-distilled 24% ABV spirit, easily replace vodka in cocktail because of its clean and crisp taste. And, shochu has 70% fewer calories than vodka.
The authors of the article, Carey Jones and John McCarthy, literally wrote a book on cocktail recipes. Here, they present three easy-to-follow shochu cocktail recipes in the Food & Wine article: a shiso highball, a salty dog, and a sencha shochu cocktail. (We’ll link to these in our cocktail recipe page as well.)
Click here to read their article and their recipes.
