Episode 98: Understanding Shochu With Stephen Lyman and Christopher Pellegrini

Shochu is Japan’s signature spirit, yet it’s not well known outside the country. As our May/June 2024 cover feature reveals, that’s starting to change, with a wider array of excellent shochu increasingly appearing in American bars. For this episode, we talk about all things shochu with Stephen Lyman and Christopher Pellegrini, the co-hosts of the Japan Distilled podcast, authors of books about Japanese spirits, and partners in Honkaku Spirits, which sources and bottles Japanese shochu and exports it to the U.S.

Radio Imbibe is the audio home of Imbibe magazine. In each episode, we dive into liquid culture, exploring the people, places, and flavors of the drinkscape through conversations about cocktails, coffee, beer, spirits, and wine.

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Paul Clarke 

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. 

And about 10 years ago, I was traveling as part of a press trip to Japan, checking out some whisky distilleries. And on one of our last nights in Tokyo, I heard from some old friends from the cocktail world, Jared Brown and Anastasia Miller, that they were also in Tokyo that night and would love to get together for a drink. We met in a cozy cocktail bar in Ginza and were having a beautiful time together. But I recognized that there are only so many cocktails one should probably drink in one sitting, and that I needed to downshift a little bit to something with lower octane, but that would still be delicious and enjoyable and very much a part of an evening out with friends. 

Normally, if I were sitting in an American cocktail bar and wanted to lower the ABV a little, I’d switch to something very vermouth-y or based on another aperitif wine. But this was Tokyo. So I told the bartender what my needs were. And he pulled out this gorgeous royal blue, hand-designed glass cup, added a few ice cubes, and then poured what, as far as I can recall, was my first taste of shochu. 

Shochu, as you’ll know if you’ve picked up a copy of our brand new May/June issue, is Japan’s signature spirit. Made from a wide array of base ingredients and produced in an even wider variety of styles, shochu can be a challenging category to grasp conceptually if you’re new to the spirit. So to start off an exploration of shochu, let’s simply start with a basic fact: Shochu is delicious.

But there are many more details about shochu to explore. To help us with that, we’re dedicating this episode to broadening our understanding of shochu, and to do this, we’re calling upon the talents of two of our Imbibe 75 alumni, Stephen Lyman and Christopher Pellegrini. Stephen and Christopher are the co-hosts of the Japan Distilled podcast. Christopher is also the author of The Shochu Handbook, and Stephen is also the author of The Complete Guide to Japanese Drinks. They both live in Japan, Christopher in Tokyo and Stephen in Fukuoka. And together they’re also behind a company called Honkaku Spirits, which sources, bottles, and imports a range of shochu, awamori, and other Japanese spirits to the United States. 

So what is shochu? What should you know about it? And why should you drink it? Here’s our conversation with Stephen Lyman and Christopher Pellegrini with answers to all of these questions. 

[music]

Paul Clarke

Stephen, Christopher, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Stephen Lyman

Thank you so much for having us. 

Christopher Pellegrini 

Oh, thank you, Paul. 

Stephen Lyman

Hello from Fukuoka. 

Christopher Pellegrini 

Greetings from Tokyo. 

Paul Clarke

So, you know, we’re gathering here digitally. I’m home in Seattle, you guys are in Japan, and we’re here to talk about a subject that’s featured in the May/June issue of Imbibe, and that is shochu. And in that feature, for listeners who may not have seen it yet, we’re aiming to give readers both a kind of shochu starter kit of information about the basics, and also gear them up for taking their own shochu journeys. You’ve both been exploring shochu for years. You’ve each written and spoken about the spirit many times. And now you’re both living in Japan and finding shochu to send back to the U.S. for people like me to dive into. How did each of you get started on your own explorations of this spirit that led you to this place where you are now? And Christopher, we’ll start with you. 

Christopher Pellegrini 

My path to shochu and awamori, which is shochu’s uncle or aunt, started in booze. Actually, I was a teenage brewer. I was actually making beer for a brewery in Middlebury, Vermont, called Otter Creek. And yes, that was legal, drinking it was not. But it engendered in me a very, very intense fascination with small batch, handmade drinks that people would line up for.

And I brought that with me when I eventually, years later, followed a girl to Japan and ran headlong into Japan’s indigenous spirits traditions. And this is not whiskey at all. This is hundreds of years prior to whiskey in terms of when they were born. And I was just completely blown away by the diversity of these drinks, by their utility, and their just complete coverage of the entire culinary landscape in Japan. Everywhere you went, these spirits existed, and I had never heard of them before. 

So I was immediately fascinated. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that hiding in plain sight was the craft beer of the spirits world in the form of shochu. I say that because there are so many different ingredients that can be used by Japanese tax law to make premium or authentic or, as we will say from now on, honkaku shochu. It’s such a small batch spirit as these things go. It really resonated with me. And I, all of a sudden, was taken back to Middlebury, Vermont, working the floor and seeing how much effort and love goes into each and every day’s production. I was just completely smitten with it. That was the beginning of the most intense and webby rabbit hole I have ever crawled down in my entire life. 

Paul Clarke 

And, Stephen, how did you wind up finding your own path there? 

Stephen Lyman

We ended up in very much the same place, but through very different holes, I guess. Christopher, with his background as a brewer—I had no interest in craft brewing. I never did anything with beverage alcohol. I was simply a foodie living in New York City who just absolutely fell in love with things like wine pairings and finding these beautiful drinks that would go really well with whatever I was eating. But I realized over time that I really did prefer spirits to wine or sake or beer, brewed or fermented beverages. They tend to just have more residual sugars. I think they’re a little bit heavier, they’re higher calorie, and I really enjoyed whiskey and gin and rum. But with all of those other drinks, I was able to just simply be an informed consumer.

If I was curious about something, I’d go read about it. If I wanted to know about what makes Jamaican pot still rum so cool and funky and weird, I’d go learn about dunder, right? When I discovered shochu in an izakaya, I was like, wait a minute, these are spirits that taste like what they’re made from, they’re low alcohol generally, and they pair really well with Japanese food. And so I became fascinated almost overnight. And then I began my research because that’s what I do. 

I’m a scientist by training, professionally. I couldn’t find anything in English on Japanese shochu or awamori that made any sense to me. It was all badly translated versions of distillers websites, and it wasn’t giving us any good information. It was describing malted rice. What is malted rice? It’s not a thing, right? And that was a poor translation of koji, right? That’s nothing like malting, it’s a completely different process.

And it took me several years to wrap my head around it because all I could do is go to bars, talk to bartenders, meet Japanese izakaya owners, Japanese expats living New York, and a lot of them didn’t know about it because they’d moved to the U.S. when they were young. It’s something their uncle or their grandfather drank. It wasn’t something that they were particularly familiar with. But over time I sort of figured it out. And as with Christopher, it just ended up being this essentially life changing rabbit hole.

Paul Clarke

And you mentioned earlier that you’re a scientist and you’re both academics in broadly different fields. And in bringing shochu into the United States and broadening its appeal, I’d imagine a great deal of education goes into the mix, for what you’re doing with bar owners, bartenders, chefs, media, so on. Having done this for a while, what are some other recurring questions or misunderstandings or misconceptions that you run into when talking about shochu? And how have you seen the overall level of understanding change in the time that you’ve been doing this? 

Stephen Lyman

I was doing a lot of my education in New York and across the US. Actually, over time I would just go anywhere I could go. When I was traveling, I’d try to find an izakaya or a bar that would let me come in and talk to people. And that’s just something I did. And I didn’t know anything about what I was doing other than I love these drinks and I wanted other people to love them. Early on, people couldn’t even pronounce the word. 

Christopher Pellegrini

They still can’t.

Stephen Lyman

Right? Shochu—for some people it’s still a challenge, And there was no awareness of that as a category. Nobody had heard of it or understood it, and they confused it often with Korean soju. Similar, linguistically, but completely different production. And then the other thing was, well, is it sake? You know, it’s no, it’s not that. Let’s just leave it at that. It’s not and it’s distilled, sake is not distilled. Shochu is distilled but then a lot of people don’t even necessarily have a firm grasp of distillation as the dividing line between fermented or brewed beverages and distilled beverages.

But the shift over the last few years, especially, I would say since 2021, has been absolutely massive. It’s really, really increased in awareness, especially in the bar community, but then consumers as well. A lot more people are reaching out to me and to Christopher asking questions and wanting more information than we had ever experienced in the past. 

Paul Clarke

Chris, have you encountered some questions? We had talked a little bit before the recording started that sometimes you keep hearing some of the same questions or misunderstandings from people. 

Christopher Pellegrini 

Routinely. Most people don’t know what a spirit is, for one. That’s obviously just one. Sometimes you just have to explain, okay, we’re talking about spirits here. Sake is not a spirit, and that’s important for people to understand. Then you run into the roadblock of this whole thing about koji. And it’s a word that shows up on menus all the time now, which is very, very helpful. You can’t understate the value of the fact that chefs around the world, and particularly in the United States right now, are experimenting with curing meats with koji and adding flavor. It’s just the umami bomb just unfolds slowly throughout all of the everything it touches. And that has been huge for us as koji spirits educators. 

But then you run into, okay, what exactly is happening here? And for the folks who are just, they have just enough information to be dangerous, and those are the homebrewers. They understand what malted grains sort of are. And then it’s going to take, it’s going to take a second. You’re both going to need a drink. You’re going to have to sit down on either sides of a small table and talk this out, because koji is just a completely different thing. They both get to the same end, sort of. But even when they do get to the point where you have saccharified grains, there’s a lot going on with koji that is not necessarily going on with malted grains.

And then this doesn’t even get into the point where these fermentations are pristine, because we have a single pass through a pot still, and that’s all you have. What you have is what you get. And that’s not normal for distilling traditions from around the world. So every single little step along the way is a point where a lot has to be explained. That’s an opportunity. It’s also something that we’re going to be doing for years and have been doing for years. 

Paul Clarke 

And you mentioned the magic word, and that was the next thing I want to get into. Because basically any time you start talking about shochu and just saying, okay, here is how it’s different from whiskey, here is how it’s different from vodka. In the first couple of sentences, koji is going to come into play. So, you know, for those who are still just kind of starting their first exploration of this, what is koji and what makes it so dang cool? 

Stephen Lyman 

Koji is magic. I’m actually wearing my T-shirt and if you can see it, it says “Mold is gold, the magic of koji.” We would not have Japanese culinary traditions without koji—soy sauce, miso, it’s a marinade, a meat tenderizer. It’s a digestive aid. It’s everything in Japan and it is a mold that very easily grows into and onto steamed grains. So it’ll proliferate on rice, it’ll proliferate on barley or other substrates. And what it’s doing is it’s converting those starches into sugars, which is what’s replacing malting. We malt barley to make beer and whisky by extracting those sugars through the malting process.

In this case, the mold is actually doing that for us. So unlike beer and whiskey, there is no hot side to the fermentation. I know that might be getting a little deep into the rabbit hole. And then while it’s doing that, it’s converting those starches to sugars so that the yeast can then convert those sugars into alcohol. That’s how we make the drinks that we love. But koji is doing lots of other things during that process. It’s taking proteins and fats that are in the grains and converting those into an umami component. So you’re getting a more rich, full-bodied flavor drink simply through the activation of the koji on the ingredients.

Paul Clarke

And you know, for me, and I’m sure for you, one of the beautiful and fascinating things about shochu is how broad and inclusive it is. In a way, when we’re talking about the raw material that shochu is made from, there are things that are more prominent than others. Sure, things like rice and sweet potatoes and barley. But there are literally dozens of different raw materials and ingredients that can form the base for shochu. It’s beautiful, but does that also pose a challenge to you when describing shochu to people where it’s not just one thing, it’s kind of many things?

Christopher Pellegrini 

Yeah, we run into this problem any time we talk about ingredients and any time we talk about how to serve it. There is—and we say this with complete confidence—there is a shochu out there, or awamori out there, for everyone, because there’s 53 approved ingredients and there’s three different main strains of koji, which all express differently during fermentation. There are a variety of different things you can do during distillation. Aging is another thing. Filtration, you know, leaves or subtracts certain components from the spirit. There is so much variety in this space that it becomes a little bit unwieldy, honestly, because at the end of the day, somebody who’s new to these spirits and actually is honestly interested in learning more will come back to, okay, yeah, but what is it? 

And that is a very difficult question to answer with a simple 10-second elevator pitch. They are Japan’s indigenous spirits made from koji, they’re single pot distilled and no additives. There—that’s your 10 seconds. But that leaves so much open to the imagination that it can be very difficult to explain to people. And while they’ll be fascinated, they’ll also be left hanging. And that’s always a danger that we are very, very aware of and very not worried about. But it’s something like we need to come back to this soon. And that’s why Stephen and I are in the United States so often. 

Stephen Lyman

I completely agree with Christopher. And just as an example, I recently had a meeting of the minds with somebody who you may know Pedro Jimenez, the mezcal expert from Mexico. And he and I had a long conversation. I got to see him present about mezcal and do a tasting. And it was incredible, like the broad spectrum of what mezcal is and can be, is amazing. It’s legitimately an incredible spirits tradition, but it’s still just agave. Now, agave is lots of different things, but it’s still just one category of ingredient. In shochu, you still have 52 others after you’ve exhausted that one. Right? So it’s really—

Christopher Pellegrini

Agave is not included, though, just to be clear. Right? 

Stephen Lyman

It’s not. It’s not. 

Paul Clarke

No, it just may get way too complicated if you throw agave into the mix. Although we say that. But, you know, things like, you know, barley and sugar cane, both are—which, you know, we have these other robust parts of the spirits world call on both of these, which I think is sometimes, you know, it can be interesting, can be supportive from a standpoint of saying, okay, you know, you’re a whiskey person, you’re a single malt whisky person, here’s a barley shochu.

You’re going to see some of the same kinds of characteristics coming through. Or a sugar-based shochu, like, if you love funky rums, try this. You’re going to see kind of the DNA carrying over between the two, but they’re both extremely different from one another as well. And that’s one of the things I really like about it. I think it’s, you know, at least that’s how I think about it. And it gives me that little kind of thing to hang onto in my mind. 

Now, late last year, I got together with you guys in Japan as part of a group. We visited a handful of distilleries making shochu, from teeny tiny places to massive industrial facilities. And also in between visiting these distilleries, we also consumed a fair amount of shochu. I think, as both of you noted, at some point, you know, we were consuming these things in restaurants and a couple of bars. These were by no means cocktail bars. And the preparations we’re seeing were typically very, very simple, very traditional kinds of ways of doing the highball or with hot water or on the rocks and so on.

When you’re looking at the U.S. market and you’re looking at people discovering shochu in the U.S. and you’re putting shochu into the hands of bartenders. How much are you hoping that bartenders start turning out some really cool cocktails with these spirits that people start to love? And how much are you also hoping that people will make sure and try out these shochu in these very simple traditional ways as well? 

Stephen Lyman 

Yeah, I think the cocktail is absolutely the gateway. Christopher and I were cocktail skeptics for a very long time, for actually most of the time we were doing this. And once we put some skin into the game with Honkaku Spirits, we realized this is the way forward. This is how we get bartenders interested and this is how consumers start seeing it on menus. And those who are curious will start to try it. It makes a beautiful cocktail that makes an opportunity to open that door for someone, and we’re all for it, for sure.

Christopher Pellegrini

Right. And with the longer play being, or the medium term play being, that once people really get interested in the cocktail application of shochu and awamori, that they come back later and start asking more questions and they say okay, well how’s it actually consumed in Japan? Because as you said, Paul, over here, there’s only a small handful of bars that are really seriously pursuing awamori and shochu in a true cocktail program or at least anything that would be recognizable to consumers in the United States. It is a small handful, too.

There’s a young crop of bartenders and they’re doing really interesting, very meticulous new things. And fortunately, there’s a lot of interplay between what’s happening in the U.S. and what’s happening in Japan. We’ve got pop-ups galore. I can think of four distinct ones just this month of bartenders from around the world coming and popping up in these cocktail bars in Japan and vice versa.

And so the information is going both ways. Interestingly enough, though, most of the—at least as far as cocktails are concerned—is coming from outside Japan in. And I think what we’re going to see is that all of these very, very innovative, all of these creative bartenders from around the world are going to crack open a bunch of new nuts, and that’s going to be observed and the handcuffs are going to come off of the cocktail programs over here—the bartenders are going to say, oh, we can do that. We can work with our indigenous spirits like that and then they’re going to do it better. 

Paul Clarke

I think, you know, going back to your example earlier of mezcal, that might be the kind of parallel there. It would be interesting to see where, you know, American drinkers were discovering mezcal in margaritas and in cocktails, and then you realize, wait a minute, this is really good. If you just pour it out and taste it, that’s really good. So maybe, you know, that same kind of parallel could come along. 

Now, at the time we’re talking in early 2024, you’re bringing in around a dozen different shochu or different labels into the United States. Can we talk about a couple of them? Because I think some of these are really fun and just kind of to show some of the variety that’s out there. And first off, I want to bring up one. We did not visit this year in Japan, but want to say this is one that I’ve tasted and just thought, man, this is so fun. And that’s Selephant, just tell us a little bit about that one. 

Stephen Lyman 

Selephant is a kokuto sugar shochu. And as you mentioned, the sugar source is very much like a rum. So it does express that way. This is made by a woman named Serena Nishihira, who is a professional recording artist in addition to being a master distiller down in Amami Islands, which is the only place in Japan that you can make kokuto sugar shochu by law. And she took over from her father relatively recently. She’s still quite young, she’s in her 30s, she does 100 percent ceramic pot fermentations. It’s single pot distilled, as all shochu is, but she makes this very kind of clean, light, almost ephemeral style, it’s a fascinating drink. And if you put in a barrel it becomes another brand that we import named Kana.

And so Selephant is actually, Serena’s nickname, and Kana is the name of the most famous woman from the Amami Islands who was the island wife of the Last Samurai. Maybe we’ll leave it at that for now. And there are two beautiful expressions. It’s the same distillate, one aged in a in a tank and one aged in a barrel. And they’re both lovely but expressed very differently. 

Christopher Pellegrini

Thirty percent ABV as is standard for most kokuto sugar shochu, and if you like rhum agricole I think you’ll find something to enjoy in Selephant because it does have this kind of grassy rhum agricole vibe from Martinique or something like that. 

Paul Clarke

Yeah. There’s something about this one specifically, but also some of the other kokuto sugar shochu I’ve tried where I just want to take a bottle into my favorite rum bars and say, Here you go, go to town with this. This is new toy for you to play with. And then when we were traveling around, also, I thought this was so cool, a green tea shochu from Chiran, with a sweet potato base. But then you say green tea shochu, people are going to think, Oh, yeah, like kind of like a tea infused. No, no, no, no. It’s not a tea infused at all, it’s like mountains of tea actually going into the pots with everything else. 

Christopher Pellegrini 

Yeah, that one is fascinating. Also, one of our newer expressions in terms of how long it’s been in the United States, it made it over the Pacific in 2023. It is a very risky proposition. There are other green tea shochu on the market, but they’re invariably made with a grain koji either rice or barley, because those, they’re less opinionated in the fermentation. And remember, we have a single pot distillation, meaning there are no mulligans here. If you have a kind of a funky fermentation, it’s going to express as funky in the spirit.

And so with sweet potatoes, you’ve got this much more opinionated type of fermentation where there’s all of these different esters and all of these different sharp edges that can sort of get in the way if you don’t have a perfectly temperature controlled fermentation that is impressively long as far as spirits go.

And in the main fermentation, which is the bulk of the fermentation, this distiller, Mr. Mori, adds a truckload of green tea. Now that’s risky for two things. You’ve got these two very strong flavors trying to marry in the fermentation, and green tea, at least down in southern Kagoshima, is incredibly expensive. Now, fortunately, Mr. Mori has his own tea fields because he’s a tea farmer in the off season, so he has access to basically at cost tea. And then he adds that to the fermentation and you get this really amazing, very chilled out, mild astringency from the green tea that marries nicely and compliments that very very there but subtle earthiness and funkiness of the sweet potato shochu. And it works so well and it’s a very singular expression.

I think in that sense, because you’re taking these two things, they grow together. I mean, honestly, tea fields and sweet potato fields are often side by side. They’re across the road from each other. But to put them together in a drink is something that wasn’t a lot of people probably imagined. Nobody really tried it. And it’s executed very well in Chiran, too. And we’re very excited about this one. As you can plainly tell from my voice. 

Paul Clarke 

Yeah, I know, it’s one of those that also, like I was saying with the sugar shochu, that I think, you know, the flavor is just so distinctive and it’s so unlike anything else you’re going to run into. But it still has the familiar characteristics that it’s one of those kind of really cool things to show people just where you can go with this spirit.

Now, a couple of years ago, we had you in the magazine for our Imbibe 75, which is always people and places who are going to change the way you drink. And here we are a couple of years later. One of the things we always like to do is to kind of revisit some of these folks and say, so what are you doing next? Where are you going with this? What can we anticipate from you guys in the months and the year ahead? 

Stephen Lyman 

We are as optimistic as ever that we are bringing the best shochu that we can find here in Japan to the US. I would love to bring in every spirit from Japan that I love. And I don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t think the market’s ready for it. But we are doing our best to bring in the nicest expressions of different styles. When we started, we were really looking to fill gaps. We understood what shochu was available in the U.S. and we didn’t want to go head to head with those brands. There’s no reason to do that. It’s such an open field right now. So we are looking for styles and expressions that didn’t exist in the U.S. market. And we’ve largely done that and there’s still a few holes for us to plug. But for the most part we’ve done that. 

So what’s coming are some of our favorite spirits from some of our favorite makers that just haven’t made it into the U.S. yet. And one that stands out for me as far as interesting ingredients is sake lees shochu. So this is essentially making another product from the byproduct of sake, the waste product from sake production. You have residual rice solids after you press out the liquid when you’re making sake, that has a residual alcohol and it still has koji and yeast. So you re-ferment that and you distill it and you end up with sake lees shochu.

And we’re bringing over one of my favorites, which is made with daiginjo lees from a local sake producer here in Fukuoka that you almost never find outside of Fukuoka. So they’re very, very local, called Shigemasu. That’s the brand name of their sake. And they’re so cute. When you visit them, you’re in this huge, beautiful sake brewery with all of the steam and the guys running around with the timing of making sake, which is a very precise effort.

And then you go through this little hallway and out a back door and into another building and you’re in the distillery and it’s about the size of probably a commercial garage. It’s pretty small, a tiny little space with a still tucked in the corner and a couple of fermentation pots. But it’s just a beautiful expression. And we’re very, very excited to have that coming to the U.S. very soon. 

Paul Clarke

We’re getting close to the exit here. Any final thoughts you’d like to share on shochu overall or drinking shochu or specific shochu in your life that we should know about? 

Christopher Pellegrini 

I’ll finish with just the ABCs and the one two threes of shochu and awamori. Just because it’s maybe a good way to remember them. ABC, additive free, shochu is additive free. B, big in Japan. Shochu and awamori outsell sake in Japan, believe it or not, by a handy margin. And C, cocktail friendly. These really are spirits that can work as either a modifier in some cases or in others as a base spirit in something familiar or something completely new. And we’re seeing that with the ongoing cocktail competitions that the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association sponsors. 

One, two, three—one, be the first of your friends to know this is still Japan’s best kept secret. We aim to change that. But as these things go, it’s a little, it’s going to take some more time. So tell your friends about it, too. Actually, I’m cheating here, this is one over two, it’s half: You want half the calories of beer, wine, sake, whiskey drinks, shochu and awamori are the lowest calorie spirits in the world. And three, three main serves outside of cocktails: neatm rocks, or in a highball. 

Paul Clarke 

Stephen, any parting comments? 

Stephen Lyman 

Well, Christopher mentioned that shochu and awamori outsell sake in Japan. There’s also more shochu made in Japan than tequila in Mexico.

Paul Clarke

That’s a very good point to make.

Stephen Lyman

Which just blows people’s minds. Right? But about two thirds of tequila and mezcal, agave spirits, export. They leave Mexico. Less than one percent of shochu leave the island, or at least Japan. So it is completely undiscovered. There’s so much opportunity here for people to discover something new. Of course, we all love to be the first among our friends to be able to introduce something new to them. That was a lot of the fun for me early on with shochu, was dragging all my friends to izakayas and geeking out over this stuff. And there’s still a lot of that that can happen. And I think a lot of people are going to discover their new favorite drink out of that exploration. So I just encourage people to go out and find a bar or liquor store that has it, and dive in. 

Paul Clarke

Christopher, Stephen, it’s very good to talk to you both again. Thanks so much for taking your time to be on the podcast and for all of your help. And I look forward to seeing both of you again at some point very soon, hopefully. 

Christopher Pellegrini

Thank you, Paul. 

Stephen Lyman

Absolute pleasure, Paul. Very nice to speak with you.

[music]

Paul Clarke

Head to JapanDistilled.com to listen in on the Japan Distilled podcast. And to find out more about the shochu and other spirits that Stephen Lyman and Christopher Pellegrini are bringing into the U.S., head to HonkakuSpirits.com. You can find links to these sites in this episode notes. 

And that’s it for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got plenty more stories and recipes for you on our website at ImbibeMagazine.com. Keep up with us on social media on Instagram, Threads, Pinterest, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here’s your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. 

I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.