Zuisen Distillery Co., Ltd. Head Office

This guide to Zuisen Distillery in Okinawa follows a fungus, not a bottle: the black koji mold strain that gave this house's awamori its tang since founder Kiyawara Yukienaga opened the brewery in 1887. It traces how the 1944 air raids that burned Shuri to the ground were thought to have destroyed that strain along with the distillery, and how a University of Tokyo researcher's forgotten lab sample survived instead. You'll hear how brewers eventually coaxed the decades-old spores back to life. Stand at the gate and think about what's fermenting quietly behind it.