I am Yamada, in charge of this month's diary.
February was very pleasant with many warm days. I only hope that spring will come soon and we will be able to feel spring visually as the cherry blossoms bloom and the greenery grows.
The theme of this month's zine is "Blue Fruits".
Instead of just using fruit to bring out the flavor of the fruit itself, we crossed cucumber and kiwi, and although we don't know what it is, it seems like it could be a fruit! I aimed to create something that was like a fruit.
When we were prototyping the distillate, it was quite cucumbery and slightly anxious, and I was quite nervous until the distillate started to come out. However, once the distillate actually started distilling, the two aromas combined nicely and made me think of cucumber fruits. The prototype and the actual distillate are quite different, so you never know unless you try it every time! We distill with a lot of patience.
This time, in addition to juniper parts, cedar parts, cucumber and kiwi parts, small amounts of decompression-distilled pink pepper and Japanese hacca were added.
The cucumber and kiwi had more aromatic volume than I expected, and after trying various combinations, I settled on this formula.
It was really difficult to create an imaginary blue fruit by crossing the two and to make the cucumber and kiwi not seem to exist, which was quite a problem.
My personal recommendation is to drink it with soda. It has a refreshing taste with the aroma of cedar leaves and Hakka.
We were talking about how it would go well with dishes with a lot of flavor and cured ham, so I'm thinking of giving it a try.
I'm trying to decide which ingredients to add to the subs, but they are all delicious and I'm having a hard time deciding, so I'm hoping to introduce them on insta-live or something,
The name of this month's Limited is "Not equal".
Because when written in symbols, ≠ resembles the katakana letter ki.
Cucumbers and kiwis are so similar that when you hear them by name, you hear them wrong, but the actual products are completely different and not equal. They are close but far apart, aren't they? This name was chosen for two reasons.
Limited Edition03 "Not equal" will be available starting Friday, March 15.
