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Mikawa Hon Mirin

Mikawa Hon Mirin

Sale price£22.00
Aichi Prefecture, Japan 300ml


Mirin began life as a drink — a sweet rice wine sipped in the Edo period, long before it settled into the kitchen as a seasoning. The old measure of a good one still holds: a mirin pleasant enough to drink is the genuine article. This is made to that older standard, brewed and aged like the rice wine it once was.
Mikawa Hon Mirin
Mikawa Hon Mirin Sale price£22.00

Hon mirin — "true" mirin — is a sweet rice seasoning that's brewed like a wine rather than blended like a syrup. This one is made from three things only: glutinous rice, rice koji and shochu, with no sugar and no alcohol added. Where industrial mirin is sweetened and brought to maturity in weeks, here the rice is brewed slowly and then aged for around two years, so all of the sweetness and deep umami are drawn from the rice itself.

The result is a deep amber liquid, mellow and rounded, with enough natural gloss to lacquer a glaze. Use it to balance soy in a teriyaki or simmered dish, to bring shine and depth to glazes, marinades, dressings and noodle broths, or simply to round the salt in almost any Japanese cooking. Once opened, store somewhere cool and dark.

Producer Sumiya Bunjiro Brewery (Sumiya-Bunjiro Shoten) has brewed mirin in Hekinan, in the Mikawa region of Aichi Prefecture, since 1910 — Mikawa being the historic home of mirin, where the rice of the plains and the brewing culture around Mikawa Bay came together. The brewery mills its own rice and makes its own koji and shochu, and works to an unusually rice-rich method: roughly one measure of mirin from one measure of rice, where the law would allow far more to be stretched from the same grain.

Ingredients Glutinous rice, rice koji, shochu (rice spirit).

ABV 14%