Japanese sweet potatoes used this way! A superb ingredient for Japanese shochu
Shochu and sake have similar bottle shapes, and their labels usually feature Japanese kanji and kana together. They are also displayed together in Japanese restaurants and on the liquor shelves of supermarkets, and when poured into a glass both are transparent or pale yellow, so they are often mistaken for the same thing.
The biggest difference between the two lies first in the ingredients, and second in the brewing method.
The ingredient of sake is rice; while for shochu, the mainstream ingredients are sweet potato, rice and barley. In recent years the shochu industry has opened its mind wide, and shochu made from brown sugar, chestnuts, perilla, black beans, vegetables and even milk has been popping up one after another.
Sake is a fermented beverage, with an alcohol content that can reach up to 22 degrees (mainstream commercially sold sake is 14 to 17 degrees); while shochu, as the name suggests, “sho” means distillation——this is a drink that is first fermented and then distilled, generally with an alcohol content above 25 degrees, and at its highest it can reach above 60 degrees.
2. Japanese shochu was not originally made for drinking
As for the origin of Japanese shochu, one account goes like this: at the end of the shogunate, the 28th lord of the Satsuma domain, Shimazu Nariakira, developed the military industry in order to enrich the country and strengthen the army, and built an arsenal beside his residence, Sengan-en. Besides producing cannons and warships, he also used a local specialty of the Satsuma domain——Satsuma potato (that is, sweet potato) as the ingredient, and distilled alcohol on a large scale as military supplies and industrial materials. But later Shimazu Nariakira suffered a crushing defeat in the Anglo-Satsuma War, and his factory was also burned down, so those military alcohol supplies could no longer be put to use. However, people discovered that this alcohol distilled from Satsuma potato actually tasted passable; at that time, slightly wealthier Japanese could already drink sake, so this shochu made from cheap sweet potatoes naturally became a godsend for the poor.
3. Why Japanese shochu is not as well known as sake, the reason should lie in its very distinctive taste
Shochu has a very distinctive flavor, so distinctive that many people do not accept it!
Among the many different types of shochu, the most mainstream potato shochu (actually sweet potato shochu) is the least easily accepted by Chinese people. Most potato shochu has a strange slight sweetness, giving the impression that the sweetness in the sweet potato is not well combined with the alcohol flavor——especially in low-end shochu, this strange feeling is even more obvious. In barley shochu and rice shochu, this feeling is milder.
4. In Japan, shochu is actually more popular than sake
Within Japan, the consumption of shochu is greater than that of sake. This point leaves me somewhat at a loss for words. After all, apart from being a bit cheaper and having a higher alcohol content, what other advantages does shochu have compared with sake?