Seriously, leach the damn citrus. That’s the key.
In the fall of 2024, we spent a few months touring Japan as we contemplated relocating from London. In this time I drank a shit tonne of chuhai and since being back in Japan I still cannot get enough.
These are classic izakaya drinks, served in mugs with ice, and either politely sipped or guzzled to get ripped as quickly as you can stand. I see you Jin!
They come in a variety of flavours from lemon to peach to elderberry to whatever else. The booze is shochu, and even then shochu can be made from all variety of veg or grains, each with a distinct flavour. The one constant is carbonated water.
Yet the real joy of these drinks is grabbing a cold can of classic shochu and lemon late at night on a walk, Wan-kan baby! I have tasted every single one on the shelf of 7-11/Family Mart/Lawsons. These range from sugary messes to astringent booze with a hint of citrus and fake sweetener.
It is with some pain that I must report the best of them is a Coca-Cola product.
Launched in 2018, the Lemondo brand was apparently a hit immediately and remains popular, often the only sold out column in the convenience store fridge or only available in a family size glass bottle. The only English on the can is the tagline “Kodawari Taste” & lemon sour.
Kodawari translates roughly to “perfect craft”, but note there is no direct translation.
True, Coca-Cola Corporation is not where we go for craft. Yet, the recipe for their drink is worth replicating. They don’t simply crush lemon or add concentrate juice to barely passable spirits.
These drinks involve methodically, to the extent possible in mass production, breaking down a lemon to get the juice plus all the oils and flavours. In short, they leach the lemon with sochu, strain, then add soda water.
These cans are mesmerizingly good, even if a family history of diabetes is telling me ≈15g of sugar a can is DANGER ZONE at scale.
So here’s how to make this at home and get a pass from a sugar-hawk that reads labels like lives depend on it.
Lemon Sour Recipe
Ingredients:
3 lemons
200 ml korui shochu
Soda water
Optional: 1 tsp raw honey or a pinch of salt
Prep:
Zest, juice, and chop the peel/pulp of all lemons
Combine in a jar with 200ml shochu (add honey or salt if using)
Leave in the fridge for 72 hours, shake it daily.
Strain out all solids, be patient and do it repeatedly with increasingly fine mesh if needed. Kodawari, right?
Serving:
Pour 60-100ml over ice and add cold sodawater to taste (at least 100 ml).
This is an easy recipe to scale. If preparing in quantity, add 0.5g of citric acid per 200ml of shochu to keep it shelf stable.
When it comes to shochu go with a barley based option. They are fuller flavoured than rice based and subtler than sweet potato based. Korui shochu is a more neutral spirit distilled multiple times. Otsurui shochu is single-distilled, retaining a richer flavour that can overpower the juice.
For lemons, find eureka lemons and do NOT get cute with yuzu.
Carbonated water is not just water. This is where true connoisseurs separate from the mob. Canada Dry soda water is standard stuff, fluffy bubbles just like the gun at the bar rail. For my money, go with something a bit sharper like Perrier. I want this drink to sting a bit if I get gluttonous and chug it.
If you’re like me, these drinks should stoke memories of doing lemon drops after hours at bars on a work night. Here’s to late nights roaming the streets while the day walkers sleep.
Cactus at Sea
This is the first piece from a new section focused on life in Japan, assuming my visa gets sorted. If the visa falls through this section will be about being completely untethered, like a prickly succulent drowning in salt water.
A nice feature of substack is sections, which let readers opt in or out of topics not just an entire publication. Go to your account on the substack site to toggle your selections as needed, but first here is a quick summary of the sections used to organize my ideas.
BROTHELS&galleries: travel including city walks, fields reports, and one day full blown guides.
the MEDIUM files: media, tech, and culture, including the monthly round-up of stuff I enjoyed.
Object Layer: technical details of decentralized digital publishing.
Cactus at Sea: expat life in Japan, including primers and observations.
Lastly, at no point am I turning on a paywall here. These dispatches are not how I ever want to make a living. I’d rather stroke it on Chaturbate if it comes to pimping myself. If you want to support, tell a real world friend about something you learned here or wait for the hardcover. I say this because a bunch of people I follow have recently put everything behind a paywall and it sucks, I can’t afford them all.
Sg
Ps: I didn’t include a photo of the Lemondo cans because the search is half the fun of walking around.
Pps: if we’re talking about lemons, never forget the greatest rant in video games.