Kodama Distillery

One of Japan’s most iconoclastic shochu distillers, Junpei Kanemaru makes shochu the old fashioned way, eschewing modern machinery for hands on methods.  His shochu is some of the very few fully hand crafted shochu being produced today. Coming from five generations of shochu makers, his family distillery was acquired when he was in school. Not to be deterred, Kanemaru found a defunct distillery dating back to the 19th century that still had a hard-to-get distilling license, and restarted the Kanemaru tradition of shochu making. A bit of a maverick, instead of depth and funk his sweet potato shochu is delicate and rewards the patient drinker with subtle tropical notes.