It can be hard to break new ground in a tradition-bound, 500-year-old category. Yet the team at Denver’s Method & Muse Spirits—recipients of the 2026 American Craft Spirits Awards—is doing just that with their Jūbun Shochu.
The shochu is the result of collaboration between Method & Muse and Basta, a James Beard Award–winning Italian restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. As the distillery was getting up and running, cofounder Ethan Tsai connected with Basta general manager Robert Clark. They got into a discussion about custom spirits and the types of things that were difficult for the bar to source on the market. One of their ideas was a shochu—but one with an elevated ABV of 47 percent and a cleaner profile to hold up in cocktails, especially martinis.
“We were looking for really gentle flavors while still steering this into something that is really meant as a building block,” Clark says.
Basta is part the Id Est hospitality group, whose restaurants all tend to have a strong focus on heirloom grains. So, for the shochu, the Carolina Gold rice that Basta uses in house quickly became a building block.
Method & Muse, meanwhile, lacks fermentation capacity—instead, it sources neutral corn-based spirit, and its focus is on adding flavor via various botanicals. Clark says they decided to macerate the Carolina Gold rice in the neutral spirit and redistill it. They then add sweet potato—also a traditional shochu ingredient—and introduce small amounts of locally grown botanicals, including calendula, marigold, elderflower, lavender, and hyssop.
It’s not traditional to add botanicals to shochu, but Clark says they add subtle nudges to the overall profile rather than obvious flavor elements.
“You're not really supposed to be able to taste it,” he says. “You would notice if it wasn’t there. These . . . really lightly [take] that heirloom rice and kind of swing it into this jasmine profile. And those . . . botanicals . . . are meant to just guide it towards where it’s trying to get. They’re definitely not meant to actually be interacting with like a gin or anything like that. These quantities are remarkably small.”
Developing Jūbun
As they were dialing in the recipe, Method & Muse cofounder and head distiller Rudy Sosa bought in about a half-dozen different varieties of sweet potato to add to the distillation, so they could see which flavors they liked and worked best with the rest of the recipe. They settled on a Japanese variety, conducting various trials on the distillery’s two- and three-liter lab stills.
“For our very small initial tests, we do like a bottle for a test. And at that level, it’s really hard to pull cuts, so initially we have no idea on cuts,” Sosa says. “Everything goes in. We just see what it is. And then as we scale up, we start figuring out cuts, what works, what doesn’t.”
When they’re ready to move up to full production, they move up to the 200-liter still. Because they’re starting with neutral spirit, cuts tend to be fairly small.
They first macerate the botanicals, rice, and sweet potato in a neutral spirit of 30 percent ABV. That begins 12 to 24 hours before distillation, depending on when during the day Sosa has time to assemble things—they haven’t found that it’s necessary to go longer than 12 hours, he says. They peel and cube the sweet potato before distilling.
“We want mostly the sweetness from the sweet potato, and a little bit [of] earthy,” Sosa says. “I feel like the peel might give a little bit too much earthiness and overpower what we’re going for, especially since the rice we’re using is a little bit more mineral- and earth-forward.”
For a 120-liter run, they use about 11 pounds (five kilos) of total additions, with a 70-30 rice–sweet potato split plus trace amounts of botanicals.
“Those are the main flavors of shochu,” Sosa says. “That’s what we wanted to focus on and highlight, so those are the big flavors. Everything else is just very tiny amounts to give that hint of there’s something else in here. This is not just normal shochu.”
On the first couple of runs, Sosa says he made the mistake of putting the rice in stainless steel hop-strainer baskets. He overestimated how much would fit in the basket, after water absorption and expansion. He overloaded it on the first run, “and it was just like a cement block when I pulled it out,” he says. “It took me hours to clean that up. It was absolutely miserable.”
For the next run, he put somewhat less into the strainer, but “it was still a heinous, sticky mess.” That led to some DIY ingenuity. “So, the last run I did, I put it in essentially a paint filter bag that you get from Home Depot, just a five-gallon mesh bag. When I pull that out, all I have to do is throw away the bag. I’m done.”
Method & Muse’s production still for all its in-house products, including the shochu, consists of the pot as well as a packed column, creating a high amount of surface area and reflux during distillation. At the top of the column, Sosa can shut off outflow from the still, sending it into full reflux. As the still runs and the flavor, aroma, and ethanol get depleted, and the temperature begins to jump, he’ll periodically turn the still to full reflux mode for 15 minutes or so, concentrating the remaining desirable components, then collecting them.
“We get more alcohol, more flavor out,” Sosa says. “I’ll see the temperature jump up again—close off the valve and just repeat the process, over and over. That’s kind of my day is sitting there watching the temperature, opening and closing a valve.”
It took about five total runs at different scales between the first iteration and the final product. Sosa says he feels that their iterative process helped in creating a product that the judges would recognize.
“Between Ethan and I and Robert, our palates are good enough to where we can pretty quickly dial in what is working and what isn’t,” he says. “At this point, we’re probably down to being able to get something dialed-in within two or three tests.”
A Shochu for Cocktails
The customers at their tasting room and at the restaurant seem to appreciate Jūbun, even if it’s an unusual approach to an uncommon style.
“People aren’t very familiar with shochu,” Sosa says. “There are certain people that are like, ‘Oh, shochu, I want to know more.’ But a lot of people are just like, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. What is this thing?’ There’s been some education on it, but so far everyone that I’ve heard that has tried it has really enjoyed it.”
Clark says the lower flavor intensity and higher ABV—as compared to traditional shochu, which typically ranges from 20 to 40 percent ABV—can trip up the rare customer who’s familiar with the style.
“You’ll get some more classic shochu drinkers who are like, ‘This is particularly unusual,’” Clark says. “But that’s mostly regarding the alcohol content.” He adds that traditional versions “are usually really robust, so we end up getting a fair amount of freedom on how we actually get to express it.”
Besides martini-type cocktails, they make a shochu and tonic that’s been popular at Basta. Clark says they’re about to roll out a white negroni built on an Arnold Palmer lemon-and-tea flavor profile, using shochu, Suze, a honey-fragranced black tea, and lemon-demerara syrup.
Meanwhile, at the Method & Muse tasting room, Sosa says they often rely on an American classic as a starting point.
“Our bartenders have been really good with playing around with it,” he says. “We make a shochu-rita out of it. Turns out really tasty. I think that’s a good way to introduce people to it.”