Pantry · Shodoshima, Kagawa
Yamaroku
Island soy sauce aged for years in century-old cedar barrels.
- Founded by
- Yamamoto family
- Based in
- Shodoshima, Kagawa
Their story
Yamaroku is a soy sauce brewery of roughly 150 years on Shodoshima, an island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea. Today it is run by Yasuo Yamamoto, the fifth generation of his family to make shoyu there.
Yamaroku is one of the few breweries still using the old wooden barrel method, which accounts for about one percent of Japan's soy sauce. Worried that barrel makers were disappearing, Yamamoto learned to build the barrels himself from local cedar and bamboo, and works to keep the craft alive.
How it's made
Soybeans, wheat and salt ferment naturally for years in large kioke cedar barrels, some more than a century old, which hold the microbes that drive fermentation. Yamamoto's job is to keep conditions right for them rather than control them. The double-brewed Tsurubishio is made by brewing a second time with finished soy sauce in place of brine.
Making 'kioke' wooden barrels takes a surprising amount of time.
Why we carry them
We think a bottle of Yamaroku changes how people see soy sauce; it is deep and rounded enough to use as a finishing drizzle.
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