Koji & Casks: A Discussion about Shochu and Whisky with Liam McNulty

0:28The people of sake actually brought me into sake. of sake and shochu, and of course, palm oil. The show is made possible with the support of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, and while we usually like to record in the JSS Info Center in Torunomon, today we're recording over Zoom. My name is Frank, and today I'm with Liam McNulty of Nominication.jp to talk shochu and spirits. So, Liam, do you want to introduce yourself? Absolutely. So, you know, I started the communication.jp in 2016. Sort of the original reasoning behind that was that there was not at the time a sort of dedicated resource towards Japanese spirits and also, you know, brewed beverage as well.

1:15There was not really a really dedicated resource for that online. So I started the website in 2016 and sort of from there, it has kind of expanded into more distilled side of that, which is to say, I think that a lot of the visitors to my website are very focused on Japanese whiskey. But at the same time, me personally, I look at Japanese, you know, the beverage whiskey as a whole, which is to say that also includes, you know, shochu, obviously, alamori as well. That also includes, say, gin or, you know, brandy as well. How did you get into spirits? in the first place well so uh to give you the fourth story i came to japan in 2008 and realistically well i don't know if it's a good thing to say but i didn't really have many friends so uh i didn't have many friends so i kind of went out to a lot of bars um you know just by myself and at some point i kind of came upon this entire culture of say cocktails and spirits in japan You know, it kind of dawned upon me that there's not really anybody that knows what's actually going on in Japan.

2:29There were actually not many people writing about it. There were not many people obviously podcasting about it. We're talking about 2008. So this is kind of before the time of YouTube and all that. I felt like there was kind of a gap between what people thought that was actually going on in Japan versus what was really happening here on the ground. and so um that's kind of the reason that i started the website is because that i kind of wanted to bridge the gap between sort of what people thought was happening here versus what's actually happening here gotcha yeah that so like because 2008 is before like the whiskey boom sake is kind of still yes absolutely i mean it's before it's before you know a lot of people really realize that you know japan is kind of place for like good good spirits good drinks i mean this is kind of before that people had kind of woken up to sort of the reality of japanese drinks what kind of what kind of cocktails what like were you based in tokyo when you first came yeah and so absolutely and so you know i i mean this is i mean we're talking about 2008 2009 to give you the full story one of the reasons i got a japanese whiskey to begin with is because of yamasaki 18 all right and at the time at the time the amazon 18 that was 4 000 yen for a shot of that okay all right 4 000 yen for a shot of that at a bar in tokyo and that yamazaki 18 really kind of set a lot of things in motion for me is because i felt like the rest of the world really did not know how how good yamazaki 18 really was and so you know i went to the hakushu distillery i think the first time in what 2009 2010 somewhere around there and you know i had fantastic like absolutely fantastic you know mizunata-aged you know whatever yamazaki something something and uh or hakushu something something and uh it kind of blew my mind and i it really occurred to me that you know a lot of people don't know what the hell they don't know what's going on here and so even at the time i I spoke fairly decent Japanese because, you know, I studied Japanese in high school.

4:44So it really kind of stuck out to me that there was kind of this gap between what people thought, what they knew about Japan versus what was actually happening. And that's that kind of encouraged you to kind of be the. Exactly. And that was that was the kind of good position to start the website was because that, I kind of wanted to have a dedicated resource to Japanese drinks, Japanese spirits. I mean, yeah, you had some articles like whatever, you know, top 10 bars in Japan or whatever top five Japanese drinks you should have or something like that. There was, I mean, there's some like one-offs, but there was nothing like actually dedicated to a specific, specifically there was nothing dedicated to Japanese drinks at the time.

5:32Would you say that's changed now? Do you feel like you're one of many? Well, no, no, I think that, you know, there's a few other websites now. And I think that, you know, the rise of social media, because, you know, when I started my website, 2016, social media, yeah, it is, but it wasn't necessarily what is in place today. So now there's, you know, there's a few YouTube channels, there's Instagrammers, there's, you know, all kinds of things. But in terms of like the independent kind of resources, you know, I look at Stefan, like so Stefan Van Eken started, you know, Nonjata. He started that like 10 years before probably I started Nominication.

6:12so i kind of look at stefan as sort of the father of sort of this impetus to start to talk about japanese whiskey well i don't know if he necessarily agree with this term but i i kind of took up the i kind of took up the porch from him okay but in any case like uh but i didn't do that on social media i did that on my own website you know it's it's independent um so i haven't necessarily relied on you know social media channels at all gotcha cool that's yeah that's difficult that's got to be difficult to get get people to show up maybe i don't know well i mean on the other hand i mean that's kind of where i started from so i don't yeah i'm i'm a little bit platform agnostic and you could you could say yeah gotcha yeah so i guess today we're here um to talk mostly shochu uh but uh if you could give us a quick reminder of what shochu is for our audience um sake and definitely has a lot of people who like sake some people like shochu so just what what is shochu and how is it different from like other distilled beverages absolutely so so shochu is sort of the national distilled beverage of japan which is to say that um you know it's got a long history over or 500 years.

7:28There's a little bit of a murkiness associated with exactly how shochu came to Japan. Some people say it came from Okinawa. Some people say it came from Kyushu directly. But in any case, the reality is that the first record of shochu goes back to, what, 17th century. So basically, it's the distilled spirit of Japan. But I think that one of the things that really struck out to me about shochu is the fact that yes it does exactly as you mentioned use koji right when you think about shochu it starts its life sort of as a sake actually because basically you know you talk about the ichiji shikomi right which is like to say the first distillation batch basically where you put the koji on the rice to basically grow the the culture right um you grow the culture of the of the koji on the shochu and And you grow it on rice.

8:26Whether we're talking about, you know, imo shochu, whether we're talking about sweet potato shochu or movie shochu or any shochu, really, realistically, it starts its life as a sake because it's sort of the same process. You know, once you have your sort of koji culture grown, then you move on to the next step, which is to say you add, say, potatoes, or you add, say, barley, or you add, say, kokedo, table broth sugar. And so it originally starts its life as sort of a sake, essentially. From there, okay, you take it to the next level. Then you say you take this mixture, and then you're going to put it into a pot still.

9:07And so as a result of that, one of the big differences between, say, shochu and the spirits of the rest of the world is that shochu typically is going to be distilled only once. is that unusual it is because i think that you if you look at most spirits worldwide it's going to be at least two or three times i mean yeah there's some exceptions you get you know poten and you know ireland and yeah so there are some other exceptions but just still drinks worldwide typically it's going to be at least two times but shochu it's only once is that true for stuff in japan like japanese whiskey and stuff no no whiskey japanese whiskey is going to be following the kind of scratch process, which is to say it's at least two times.

9:52Oh, really? So shochu is kind of very special in that way. It is, it is. And even if you look at, you know, if you look at just still it's worldwide, if you just still it once, you're going to have too much labor left over. You're going to have too much proteiners left over. And so, but one of the things that strikes out to me about shochu is that you specifically want that to be there. that's kind of the point of shochu is that you want to have these kind of underlying ingredients. You want to have that specific flavor profile say your sweet potato or you want to have that kind of underlying profile of your barley or your rice, something like that.

10:33Wait, let me make sure I understand what you're saying. So like normally if you're making a distilled beverage that's not shochu, you don't want any flavor or most flavor. let's not let's not let's not um let's not get it wrong all right so so let's say for example you're making a whiskey you want the barley to exist to some point right to some extent okay uh which is to say you know in the case of whiskey you're generally going to distill two times for for a scratch or a japanese but in the case of shochu you absolutely want that profile to be they're very very forward so so the distilling process removes some stuff and it the more you do it the more is removed well and we can take it a step further is because realistically if you look at chill tube distillation like the actual distillation process a lot of these distillers are using vacuum distillation which is to say that they can lower the boiling point of alcohol that comes off the still, which is to say that they leave more cozeners in the original ingredients, which gives it a richer flavor of the original ingredients.

11:43Interesting. And that would not be desirable for other distilled beverages, potentially. Well, the problem is if we're talking about whiskey, vacuum distillation of whiskey is not really a thing because typically in whiskey, you're going to want the spirit to contact copper. and in vacuum distillation we're talking about stainless steel pot skills okay that's good for shochu but in whiskey you're talking about copper you want to do vacuum distillation in copper i'm sorry it's gonna it's gonna implode okay yeah it's not thick enough interesting huh i did not know that that's that's so shochu is really focused on getting like maximal flavor but also being a distillate well let's let's just be to be a little bit more clear uh i'm talking about I'm going to call it Shochu here.

12:30Okay. Kodui Shochu is a different kind of beast altogether. Kodui Shochu is like basically the kind of triple distilled, column distilled. That's a little bit closer to like a vodka. That's something that you're going to put in, say, a lemon chuhai or a, you know, a hopi or something like that, right? Versus home conquer Shochu, which is more about bringing out the best that the base ingredients have their own. But it's watered down, right? So basically, when you get a typical Honkaku shochu off the first pot still, it's going to be around 45-50%, which is legally beyond the limit for Honkaku shochu.

13:10So typically in, say, Kyushu, Kagoshima, they're going to water it down to 25%. But if you go over to the next prefecture, Miyazaki, they're going to water it down to 20%. Just a little bit of a different culture there. but in any case they are yeah they're going to water it down a little bit because basically the law dictates that shochu has to be under i think 45 are there shochus that are sold at 45 percent uh once you get past that you can no longer legally sell it as a shochu it has to be a speeded suit in terms of like the national tax agency definition yes is that too much flavor basically like from a consumer or like a drinker perspective is that why you would water it down is because it's so much flavor compared to like a normal quote-unquote normal or non-shochu style spirit it's a difficult question because once you get to like 45 % ADD we're talking about sort of like the heads of a distil run on the shochu still right and we talk about heads yes that is very intensive flavor okay uh which is a more than probably your average home cocktail shochu drinker would want probably i mean people like us that are you know involved in the spirits industry yeah maybe that's kind of the thing we prefer but i think your average you know kind of home cocktail shochu drinker is probably not going to want something that you know started its life as whatever 45 % ABV you know shochu right do they mix the heads with like the middle and the tails yeah yeah typically yeah I mean typically that's what you do because realistically you're gonna have to throw out a lot of like the kind of flavor giving profile because the heads realistically is where you get a lot of flavor out of any distillation I mean that's not specific to shochu I mean that's the case with gin that's the case with whiskey That's the case with, realistically, a lot of distilled beverages.

15:08And so that's where you get so much of the flavor to be in it. And yeah, it also is the highest ABV, which is to say that, you know, a lot of these shochu distilleries, they don't want to throw away their heads. So I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of panatare. Panatare basically is like the first kind of several drips that you get off this still. Okay. Yeah, and that's got so much more flavor to it. It's also got so much more ABV. I mean, Hanatata typically is, what, 60 % ABV, somewhere around there. Oh, wow. Yeah. Do people save that? Well, I mean, some distillers, you know, sell it as a separate product.

15:48Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. How much of a percentage of, like, the total distillation process would that be? Is it, like, 2 %? I mean, yeah. I mean, no, no. I mean, we're talking about heads. I mean, any of the subproducts, I mean, probably it's going to be, you know, 9 % to 8%, I think, for your heads. And the rest of it's going to be the arts. And then, obviously, you've got your tails as well. Tails tend to be kind of useless in terms of the distillation process. Oh, interesting. But, like, so this is a little bit of a slight topic away from the manufacturing process, but how did you get into shochu?

16:25I mean, the reason I got into shochu is because when I came to Japan, I got into kind of all distilled drinks altogether. And so I originally started with whiskey. And obviously, you know, that's kind of what my website is about now. But at the same time, I felt like, look, I'm here in Japan. And I can't ignore this entire, you know, category of distilled beverages. And so I started to kind of study more about shochu. And the more I learned about it, the more I learned that it's actually one of the most complex categories of distilled beverages in the world. It's because, you know, you can use so many different ingredients.

17:14you can use so many different styles of you know koji or you know yeast and then you can do what vacuum distillation you can do atmospheric distillation there's so many more kind of levers that you have with the shochu and the more the more that I learned about the complexity about shochu the more and more that I appreciate the category for what it has to offer versus say a whiskey or say a jinn or say you know a mezcal whatever what are the rules for shochu what like to make a honkaku shochu what do you have to do so one of the things that is kind of a misconception is that honkaku shochu does not have to be single distilled oh really it has to be plot stilled which is to say you cannot use a continuous still but you can send it on the same plot still twice and it is still a hongkong shochu.

18:12But there's also some rules about, you know, the resulting ABV. I think it has to be, I'd have to check, but I think it has under 45 % ABV. Fresh from the still or before you sell it to the consumer? That's the bottling strength. And then there's a whole host of ingredients. And there's actually some really kind of crazy things in this list of ingredients. You can do cactus. you can do whey, like the byproduct of making cheese. There's all kinds of kind of wild things that you can make shochu from. Are there cactuses in Japan? Yeah, well it says sabuten, that's what the law says, so yeah. Wow, okay.

18:54The law is actually quite literal about exactly what you can call a hongkaku shochu versus what you can not call a hongkaku shochu but in any case realistically Basically, outside of the main categories, take for example, tomorokoshi, like, okay, corn. A corn shochu, yes, you could make a shochu from 100 % corn, in theory. But realistically, is it going to be a good shochu? Probably not. Most people that make corn shochu, by law, as long as it's, I don't remember the percentage, 5 or 10, as long as it's like 10 % corn, you can still call it onkaku, tomorokoshi shochu. But the rest of it, you can make it barley or potato, sweet potato, something like that.

19:41Interesting. So it's almost like a lot of them are used as flavoring. Yeah, and the problem, I mean, Frank, realistically, this is kind of a overarching issue with Japanese regulation and the whole. is still the wild, wild west. The regulation here is quite low compared to other countries in the world and shochu is the same situation. I see. And realistically, I think going forward, that's something that the industry as a whole probably needs to kind of close that gap. Is there pressure from distillers to close that gap or are they kind of happy where it is? Well, that's an interesting question because I think that there have been some kind of voices in the industry now to allow specifically around the color regulations surrounding shochu.

20:36Because what happens is that if you were to age a shochu in a oak cask, for example, it's going to change color. And according to current Japanese law, once you age it past a certain point, once it gets past a certain point of color, you can no longer call it shochu. And so there are other voices in the industry that say that, okay, well, realistically, we should still be able to call that shochu. But there's other voices in the industry that say that, I'm sorry, once you put it in a task too long, it's not shochu anymore. So there's kind of a little bit of a conflict there, I think, between certain parties that say that once it gets to be past a certain coloration.

21:20Can't call a shochu anymore. And the original reason for that is because the tax agency said that we can't tell the difference between that and say a brandy or a whiskey. And the fear would be that you were calling a brandy or a whiskey a shochu. Well, the fear is that you have to pay more tax on it. That's the fear. It's because shochu has a beneficial tax benefit up until 40%, what, 40%, Shochu can theoretically be less taxed than a, say, spirit or whiskey could be. So if you could create something that's basically a whiskey but still be able to call it shochu, you're cheating the taxman. You would be able to sell it for higher, and you would also be able to tax it for less.

22:12I see. Well, got to give the NTA their due, I suppose. Well, tax ban, yeah, of course. The National Tax Agency is the one who regulates what shochu is, right? Like sake? Absolutely. Yeah, so if you look at the tax law now, basically they're going to say, you know, kōrui shochu or otsurui shochu, which is to say kōrui shochu is obviously kind of the continuous distilled stuff. And otsurui shochu is sort of the single distilled stuff or post-stilled stuff, I should say. so yeah they're kind of the ones that decided that uh since i don't know 1960 something if i remember correctly but yeah in any case um they're the ones that have decided these kind of categories but taxation on those two categories isn't any different it's just a matter of distinguishing you know kind of the two products oh interesting okay huh this kind of connects to another question i want to ask you about but is there like like in sake a national tasting event where all of the all of the different distillers submit something like the national sake to get um yeah but there is an organization that does sort of the scientific approach to tasting of shochu these are the guys like in lab coats that show up from the national laboratory of something, something, something, right?

23:37So yeah, that does exist for shochu as well. Is there a style that everybody does? I feel like in sake, you have this specific style that uses Yamada Nishiki, a particular type of yeast, a particular type of ratio. No? Nope, nobody cares. The thing with shochu is that there's so many local shochu facilities that that you've got people growing their own potatoes on their own farm. They're taking it super hyper local. And they're only producing, whatever, 100, 200, 300 bottles a year. Realistically, that's what they're kind of satisfied with, is they don't necessarily have any ambition to expand overseas or anything like that.

24:27They're just actually being a super-duper craft producer of shochu. and they're going to take it to the next level in the sense that you know they're going to tell you like okay well you know this field right here that's this bottle next field over like literally like whatever 10 meters away that's this bottle they're like uh i've never seen like even even in scotch even with scotch okay sometimes you get like scotch distilleries being like okay well here's this farm, here's this farm, here's this farm. But I've never seen them beat down to this level that shochu has. Do they taste different? Interesting question.

25:12I think that typically what they're going to do is they're going to put a little bit of different accent on that. Not necessarily have the only believer be the origin of the, say, potatoes, sweet potatoes. they're also going to put a little bit of different koji or something in there. Okay. Just to make it a little bit different from the other one, yeah. Okay. So, like, maybe the potatoes do taste a little different, but to highlight the difference or something, they'll do a little other different thing. It's an accent, yeah. Yeah. You are a judge of shochu, right? Sure. Turkey Whiskey and Spirits Competition, yes.

25:46How'd you get into that? Well, so, originally, I mean, I started my website, like I mentioned, in 2016, and basically started to talk to the Tokyo Whiskey Research Center probably around 2020 or so. And then I think that at the time, they kind of wanted to introduce... Because back when the Tokyo Whiskey and Spiritist Competition started, they did not have a shochu or aomori division at all. The first year was only kind of Western spirits, right? Interesting. yeah so they wanted to introduce a chouchu and aroi division and so i think as a part of that they kind of wanted maybe a little bit of a non-japanese voice into that and so i think because of my involvement with them you know i had worked with them a little bit for that so they reached out to me and said you know do you want to be a judge for you know the the competition but they didn't just ask me if i want to be a judge they asked me if i want to be on the executive committee okay so yeah so i'm in the executive committee and as part of that they asked me to also invite some more judges as well so i don't know if you know steven like steven lyman yep uh or chris pellegrini so yeah so basically these guys are judges on the tokyo whiskey and spirits competition because i i had taught them out as kind of experts in say shochu at the time right yeah it's realistically realistically those guys have probably forgotten more about shouju than i have ever known so yeah so no i sought them out as kind of you know judges to be on the competition and so that's kind of where i think that we originally started how do you like you like you've been saying there's so many different varieties and different ways to make something that you can call hongkaku shouju how do you judge it in terms of judging officially as a competition we're only allowed to judge spirits based on their straight profile which is to say okay yeah we can maybe add a little water but we cannot add ice we can't add soda we can't add whatever tonic water anything like that right so we're specifically supposed to judge spirits based upon their regional profile as it comes out of the bottle and so that's kind of one of the toss-ups about shochu is because realistically you know you go to kagashima you go to you know how many people are actually drinking shochu straight out of the bottle the answer is probably zero i mean nobody's actually drinking it like that so is that kind of the thing that spirits makers actually prefer us to judge their spirits you know as judges for a competition and so this is kind of a a hot topic i think within the executive committee at the moment at the moment is, you know, would you really put a 25 % ABV spirit versus the 44 % equivalent, you know, within the same lineup?

28:49Because as far as a sort of whiskey drinker is concerned, which realistically most of us on the Tokyo Whiskey and Spirits Competition backgrounds, realistically, that's the kind of, that's where we come from is we're starting kind of with the whiskey background. And so in that sense, is it appropriate to put a, say, 25 % spirit versus a 40 % spirit, you know, head to head like that? And so I think this is something that kind of we need to still, I think, work out as competition, because I think that some maybe judges still unnecessarily appreciate the kind of flavor profile that sort of a lower ABV beverage still presents.

29:30i wonder i wonder if it's kind of like the the olive oil competitions where like you're not using it in food but you're tasting it and then imagining how it would be good in food well and and this is this is kind of my rub this is kind of my rub actually because if you look at you know sort of the culture of shochu would you ever actually check it straight uh the answer is probably no you know i don't know if you've been to kagoshima i don't know if you've been to miyazaki realistically you order a bottle for the table and then there's ice and then there's soda or say you know at least like hot water something like that and so there's always this kind of different kind of aspect that you add to it and so you know we are judging it as it is straight from the bottle but i think going forward i'm not necessarily entirely sure that that's the right approach to it because that's realistically not how it's actually consumed would there be a place maybe not at the tokyo whiskey and spirits competition maybe not there but for like a soda category and a water category and like an oyu hot water category so frank this is one of the things that i actually really stress and so actually this year at the award ceremony in august there is going to be a cocktail corner where the award-winning bottles of shochu you can take it over to the counter and have oyuari where you can have soda or you can have just under rocks this is uh to be that's a little bit of a a little bit of a victory but yeah because i think that a lot of these shirts should make this i mean they're not they don't want you to drink it straight necessarily right i mean yeah sure some of them do but uh reasonably a lot of them probably don't how how does the ranking work is it like this is the best bottle of this year or is it like do you have different categories?

31:23If you could explain a little bit more about that. Right. So what we do is we have basically a first sort of judging round. And from the first judging round, we come up with, say, no metal, or we come up with bronze, or we come up with silver, or we come up with gold. And of the golds, we take those to the second round. And from those, we have say superior gold that's the other kind of round that we have and so from the superior golds we then go to the nijishinsa which is like the tertiary judging round which is where we kind of decide the category winners and so category winners if we're talking about say nubishochi for example we have a category winner for 26 abd or less and then we also have a category winner for 26 ABV or more.

32:15So we have, you know, individual category winners that we decide kind of from the secondary round of judging. Interesting. Okay. How many people make up, like, the judging team? Or how many judges do you have? So I think for Shochu, we have... I have to get you the numbers, but I think we have 100 and something now for the first round. 100 judges? Yeah, 100 something, I think, for the first round of Shochu. Wow. And then for the secondary round, I think we have probably, I want to say 15, 20, somewhere around now. Okay. Yeah, I think that it's probably that. I'll have to get to the numbers later, but yeah.

32:56Yeah, that is way more people than I was expecting. I was expecting you to say like four. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. And for the first round of judging, we need to have at least nine people on any given flight of, yeah, we need to have at least nine people on any given flight and that's true of you know western spirits division and shochu division what what uh how many shochu are in a flight typically the flight you're gonna leave i don't know six to eight okay six to ten yeah yeah six or ten uh ten at the most probably yeah and then you're judging in just in that flight or no no no we we i mean the the score is we're not necessarily comparing one trick to another okay we basically give any given bottle its own individual rating.

33:44It's not competition, per se, between bottles to say, okay, this bottle is better than that one. It's more about what is this individual bottle? What's the score on that particular one? And is there a platonic ideal for a Moogi Shochu that if it's this close, it's likely to get gold? I mean, I think, me personally, when I think of a movie shochu, I think of something that would really kind of display its profile as being able to really bring out the character of a proper sort of barley-based shochu. which is to say that when i judge a spirit i think about what the distillers originally had aimed for and how much should they actually accomplish that maybe they're trying to cover something up and maybe maybe they did a fantastic job of that but at the same time uh there's other other spirits where you know they have this fantastic absolutely phenomenal say you know rice that they use uh so give you one example so like one of my favorite spirits this year was basically a homey shochu so like a rice base you know rice base shochu and it really struck out to me because they had absolutely done a fantastic job of bringing out the pure like rice elements of that spirit and so i rated them very highly and they ended up winning the rest of the category so i think that you know it's not just me other other judges thought the exact same thing is because they did a fantastic job of sort of accomplishing the goal that they had in mind.

35:28And so I think that from my perspective, I think of kind of what, as a instiller, what you're really trying to accomplish. And so where do you go with that? Do you actually accomplish that goal or not? So for instance, when I want to introduce somebody to Shochu, I often turn to Dayame. But Dayame is not... And that's a good start. That's a good start. Rudy, but yeah, good start. But it's not, like, normal for, like, an emo shochu, right? It's not. So, like, are you kind of judging, like, if Dayame was in the competition, are you judging Dayame on its Dayamen-ness more than how it is to, like, other emo shochus?

36:07Is that kind of the idea? If I were to taste a Dayame on the competition, I would look at it and say, is this an Emo Sochu? And so it's not. However, at the same time, I could absolutely tell what they're aiming for when they made it. How much did they actually succeed in making that spirit? And so I could say, okay, well, yeah, I see it. Yeah, Dayame is, you know, that's a fantastic spirit, right? It's because it's accomplished what its goal is to set out. So like it's trying to do this thing. Right. has it done this thing very well then it's going to get a high score yeah has it really done this thing that it wants to do and yeah i mean you look at a lot of you know sweet potato shochu and a lot of them are like okay well you know we're trying to do like whatever yaki mo like yaki mo shochu like they're trying to do like you know guys selling a you know baked potato from the back of his truck they're obviously aiming for that right and how much should they accomplished that some of them have accomplished it 90 95 some of them i don't know 70 something like that so that's kind of the thing that we look for is that you know how much of your specific goal have you really accomplished that makes sense yeah okay i'm i'm i'm getting the picture i feel like how many how many shochu categories in the competition are there oh uh yeah so we don't break it down by boji type but we do break it down by base ingredients so we have come imo uh we've got mugi and then we have soba and sonota and then we also have aomori but within those we also have subcategories for 25 abv or less for youtube okay so which is to say all together i think we've got probably can and awamori is treated as its own separate it is yeah i mean how many that's a different beast like you were saying with the shochu creators of being some of them are super local not super concerned with expansion just kind of doing their thing for their local community would you say that's true of awamori too or is that like culturally is that a little bit different or like market wise industry-wise a little bit different no i don't think so i mean i think that Aonmori, a lot of Aonmori makers are keen on expansion in the same sense that shochu makers are.

38:33Aonmori tends to be a little bit more hyper-local in that, if you look at shochu as a whole, 99 % of shochu is consumed within Japan. But within that, 99 % of Aonmori is also consumed within Okinawa. so it's like you know it's even a hyper more of a hyper local version of you know shochu within that so I think that our money makers probably aren't necessarily terribly concerned about you know foreign exports provided that their existing market is sustainable so it's can we serve everybody in Okinawa who wants our stuff then can we serve the Japanese people outside of Okinawa who want our stuff then do we want to sell overseas?

39:22I see. Right. Do people see the competition as a way to promote overseas or is it mostly domestic focus? Well, that's kind of one of the things that we're kind of looking at is that I think that overseas promotion of the competition results is probably not where it should have been. You know, Tokyo Whistler and Spears competition compared to, say, you know, San Francisco World Spears competition. it's not where it should be obviously you know you guys are from a sake background you've got you know all kinds of different sake competitions but spirits wise you know ISC there's all kinds of different competitions which I think don't they probably have a much higher weight than say Tokyo Whiskey and Spirits competition for now I hope that that can change in the future but yeah no absolutely I think that's something we need to change there's no other competitions outside of Japan that include Shochu as a category right?

40:18SWC does have a shochu category. Oh wow okay. Yeah. Are there places outside Japan that make shochu? Yeah there's a few distilleries I think there's one in what Hawaii there's New York I think there's a couple. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Who do they have judge? Like do you just go? No no no it's not me no no I definitely don't go. Oh okay. Yeah no no. And I mean on the other hand And in some senses, I would actually prefer somebody that doesn't know something, that doesn't know anything about shochu to judge these spirits. Because realistically, the reason that these makers enter their spirits into the competition is so that they can market their products to overseas customers, right?

41:02they would kind of prefer that people that don't know anything about shochu judge their spirits like in sort of the context of a brandy or a tequila or you know uh something like that i think that they would kind of prefer that they have kind of no background about it and then they turn around and say that oh actually that's you know a wonderful spirit i think that trying to market your products to people from overseas you really realistically are going to have to start from scratch on a lot of the consumers as part of the competition do you provide notes on what the judge yes we do oh really okay tasting us yeah absolutely yeah and the distillers are pretty excited or happy to get those yeah and that's one of the things about the tokyo whiskey and spirits competition is that we always provide tasting every judge provides tasting notes no matter what you're judging you know or no matter what you thought about it yeah you're going to provide tastiness.