「気」 - Ki

When I used to live in Japan, a long time ago, I tried to educate myself about Nihonshu or sake, but what I found was that it was very difficult to find some of the labels that I would read about in magazine or books. I would keep running into the big Kura 庫 like Kubota 「久保田」 or Otokoyama 「男山」 or Hakkaisan 「八海山」 and even these seemed to taste a little different depending on the restaurant and how they were served. Also being a young(er) man, sometimes the object of the evening was really just to get drunk, so I eventually developed more of a taste for shochu. An what evocative names they had! My favourite and easily obtainable was called Hyakku Nen no Kodoku 百年の孤独 or a Hundred Years of Solitude, labelled after the Gabriel García Márquez novel. 

And this ostensibly being a website about the martial arts, I came across this wonderful sounding shochu recently called 「気」, a black sugar shochu 黒糖焼酎 from Kagoshima 西平本家(鹿児島県産). And wouldn't it be great if we could increase our Ki just by sitting down and drinking it! It is a light and refined taste, but retains great depth and is 25 percent alchohol. Anyway, I wanted to post a few pictures of the bottle, and please note the wonderful calligraphy which is written in the traditional way rather than the Japanese Kanji. 

The black version is a limited edition called the 黒麹 or Black Malt and it usually comes in a White Malt edition.