A casual excursion along an Okinawan neighborhood can lead to interesting surprises. Take, for instance, a few days ago when my much better half shamed me out of my easy chair and into my walking shoes for a stroll into the crowded hills of Chatan Cho, just north of the Camp Foster fire station.
Not far from our house on a typically narrow and somewhat steep street is a nondescript building like many others. The lane is barely the width of a tiny car and as I was sucking in my gravity-seeking belly to allow one to pass, I noticed through the gaping doors of the structure a bank of gleaming stainless steel vats. They were huge, from floor to the second story tall with valves and tubes snaking about.
Curiosity aroused, I stepped in and asked if anyone spoke English. A young man tending to a smaller vat politely motioned for me to wait as he went in and came back with another young man. This was Mr. Tamanaha Yutaka, who, as it turned out, is the comptroller of the enterprise, and who explained that I was in a shuzosho. A shuzosho is a distillery and here at the Cha Tan Cho Rho Shu Zo is concocted the potent liquor unique to Okinawa known as awamori.
About six hundred years ago a crafty traveler sailed from Thailand to Okinawa bringing a batch of long-grained rice and the secrets of its distillation into the drink that Dr. Kinichiro Sakaguchi of Tokyo University, an authority in the field of zymurgy, declared “one of the best spirits in the world.” (Zymurgy, by the way, is the study of the process of fermentation in brewing and distilling. It is distilling that makes awamori different than sake, which is brewed much like beer, although also using rice as its basis.)
While the cat is out of the bag in terms of making the clear ‘firewater’, the rice used is still the indica genus of Thailand. Awamori is made by only forty-seven distillers in the Ryukyus and they each have their own particular way of blending the final product. The blending proportions, however, are still trade secrets and rely on the abilities of professional tasters to produce the desired formulas.
According to Mr. Yutaka, who guided us through a tour of the plant, the process in use is still the same basic one discovered centuries ago. The rice is first washed and steamed in vats for at least twenty-four hours. It is then dried and kept at a constant warm temperature for another short period. Here it is introduced to another interesting specimen, a black mold called ‘koji’. Black koji mold is also indigenous to Okinawa and used nowhere else. As the koji permeates to the core of the heated rice it creates enzymes that break down starch molecules into sugar, which can then be fermented.
After a day or two water and yeast are added to the koji rice in other vats and covered for two or more weeks. Now the mixture is a mash known as ‘moromi.’ Up until now the process for making sake and awamori are similar. But then comes the distillation where the moromi is heated and the water extracted. What remains is raw liquor.
The new spirits are stored, initially in underground tanks to cool, then in the large steel tuns that first caught my eye. The awamori ages for at least three years before it is blended either with older spirits and/or water to desired proofs. Awamori, like most distilled liquor, mellows with age and the price rises with the years.
The task of overseeing the operation falls to Mr. Hitoshi, who is also the master taster. He is in charge of creating the end products of the business, which has been in the same family and location for over one hundred years.
As with all alcoholic beverages awamori should be treated with respect both for its potency and its origins.
The thing is, I learned much about the liquid in the bottles I see in every store and tourist shop from my little jaunt, and I’m eager as a puppy now when my much better half holds up the leash and asks, “Ready for a walk?”
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