FIRST JOURNEYS - 80 GINS AROUND THE WORLD - PIN 45 OF 80
SAKURAO Brewery and Distillery Co, Hiroshima Japan
AROUND THE WORLD, ONE BOTTLE AT A TIME,
PHILEAS FOGG WOULD SURELY APPROVE
There are plenty of ways to talk about the environment when it comes to gin — from sustainability and reducing a distillery's footprint to simply looking at the landscape that surrounds it.
For Sakurao, it's the latter that really interests me, because so much of what makes this gin special comes from the local environment around Hiroshima.
Chugoku Jozo has been around since 1918 and is known for producing Togouchi whisky. Just shy of their centennial celebrations, they decided to take another step and build the Sakurao Distillery, which opened in 2018. The distillery is located in Hatsukaichi on the coast next to the Seto Inland Sea, with Miyajima Island just across the water.
Miyajima is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, famous for its ancient Itsukushima Shrine and great forests covering Mount Misen, and the island's distinctive flora and coastal environment provide plenty of inspiration for Sakurao's gins.
Sakurao Original Gin is small batch distilled using a combination of steeping and vapour distillation. It uses nine botanicals sourced from Hiroshima, alongside five imported botanicals including juniper and coriander seed.
It's citrus forward, with Hiroshima green lemon, navel orange, sweet summer orange and green yuzu, alongside Japanese cypress, green tea, red perilla and ginger. It's a gin that isn't trying to be anything other than a classic dry gin with a distinctly Hiroshima character — fresh and citrusy, with the traditional juniper backbone and a lovely spicy finish.
Their Sakurao Gin Limited takes the local environment even further, using 17 botanicals sourced entirely from Hiroshima. There's local juniper, cherry blossom, green tea, yuzu, orange, shiso, wasabi and ginger, but it's the inclusion of oyster shell that really caught my attention.
The oysters are raised in the waters around the distillery and the shells are used to add a gentle salinity to the gin — quite literally bringing a taste of the Seto Inland Sea into the bottle.
Then there's Sakurao Hamagou, the annual limited edition which celebrates Miyajima through one very particular local botanical. Hamagou is a coastal plant with fragrant purple flowers which has been used as incense in Japan since the Heian period. The distillery has special permission to handpick the flowers around Miyajima and combines them with other local botanicals to create a wonderfully aromatic gin.
The bottle also features the famous orange-red Great Torii Gate, which appears to float in the sea at high tide and marks the entrance to Itsukushima Shrine.
My bottle is the 2019 edition, so it's now a little piece of Sakurao history, as the distillery has continued to release a new Hamagou each year. The 2026 edition is the ninth release, launched in July this year, which means my bottle is now several editions behind the current one!
Hamagou has a refreshing herbal fragrance and I love the fact that the distillery has managed to turn something so intrinsically connected with Miyajima into an annual expression of place.
The story of Sakurao is also very much about continuity. Chugoku Jozo has been distilling in Hiroshima for more than a century and the Sakurao Distillery continues that tradition while looking forward, producing both gin and Japanese whisky. The distillery runs tours where you can see the stills and explore the botanicals themselves, so if you're visiting Hiroshima, it's another one I'd definitely put on the list.
The combination of Hiroshima's citrus, herbs, flowers, tea, juniper and even the sea itself makes these gins a lovely example of how a sense of place can be captured in a bottle. You could almost plot the landscape of Hiroshima from the botanical list!
"Where the mountains meet the sea, and the local landscape finds its way into the bottle."
TORII GATE
50ml Sakurao Original Gin
15ml Spritz Syrup (or Campari)
15ml Dry Vermouth
30ml Blood Orange Juice
"Show me a bottle
and I'll tell you a story."
