About This Product :
The Ingredients: Made from superior water that flows from the Kawabe River and local Sagara village rice. Multiple distilled to a Honkaku Shochu of 24% ABV.
The Spirit: Incredibly mineral-driven. Crisp and clean and pure, this shochu redefines shochu drinking. We recommend savoring the delicate flavor of Kawabe while imagining summer fireflies flitting over the cool, pure waters of the Kawabe River. Serve at room temperature, chilled, or on the rocks- it is always a delight.
The Terroir: The Kawabe River watershed is carpeted with spring-fed rice paddies that turn a beautiful golden hue in the fall season as the rice ripens for harvest.
Kazuki Yoneda, a farmer who has been growing rice for 50 years and whose rice is used to make Kawabe, explains, “Quality water is key for making good, sweet rice.” The Kawabe River, which flows through the village of Itsuki before joining the Kuma River in Sagara, irrigates most of the rice paddies in the region, but Mr. Yoneda waters his paddies with even purer water, straight from a freshwater spring that pumps out four tons of water every minute at a steady 17°C, even in summer. Fresh from the spring, this water has a bracing chill on the tongue and is very delicious. Using water of such excellent quality for irrigation is precisely why Mr. Yoneda is able to grow rice of such high caliber.
The Kawabe River is famed both for the quantity and the quality of water that flows through it. It is the largest tributary of the Kuma River, and flows for a length of 67 kilometers. Since 2006, for 17 years running, the Kawabe River has been named by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport as having the most beautiful water out of all the rivers of Japan. The waters sparkle a bright emerald green hue as the light reflects off the river, but a closer look reveals a clarity that extends down to the rocky riverbed. Sweetfish, gobies, chubs, and trout populate the waters, and the air around the river twinkles with innumerable fireflies in early summer.
The Distillery: Jisuke Tsutsumi, created Sengetsu in 1903. He came from a family of soy sauce brewers, thus he already had knowledge of brewing techniques that he then utilized in making shochu. He named his shochu “Jisuke Shochu” and it was quite popular back then.
He was followed by his son, Jisuke Tsutsumi, Jr., who overcame difficult times post-WWII to spread the then-unknown Kuma Shochu to Kumamoto, Fukuoka, and Tokyo in the 1950s. He was followed by Masahiro Tsutsumi, who is the current owner of Sengetsu. In 2003, on the 100th anniversary of our founding, we changed the name of our company from Mine-no-Tsuyu Shuzo, which had been our name for a quarter-century since the time of Jisuke Tsutsumi, Jr., to our current name of Sengetsu Shuzo to mark our first step into a new era of shochu-making.
