I made soy sauce for ten years before I went to Japan. My first trip there was in 2015, to be on a Japanese TV show called Sugoi Desune Shisatsudan, which translates to Fantastic Researcher. The premise of the show was to pair somebody doing something traditionally Japanese outside of Japan with somebody in Japan, who is thought to be a true master of their craft. I had nothing to lose, and it was a validating experience. They paired me with a man named Toshio Shinko, a fifth-generation soy sauce brewer. He is regarded as the world’s best, and he’s been acknowledged more than ten times.
I learned a lot. On set, I called our production team and told them to adjust certain things we were doing. I wasn’t over there for that long trip, maybe three days, not enough time to get jet lagged, and I went back four or five times after that trip. In a 12-month span, I spent more than 30 days in Japan, touring different soy sauce breweries and learning their techniques. Everybody had their traditional soy sauce, shou – that’s all we made then. All those brewers had an extension of their line, including a double-fermented, smoked soy sauce and a ponzu. We started to develop these variations of soy sauce.
Yuasa-cho in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan is known as the birthplace of Japanese soy sauce, or shoyu. The small seaside town is a registered Japan Heritage Site with quaint streets that offer a glimpse into its history.
We now make a double fermentation as well, where our Bluegrass Soy Sauce takes 12 months to make, the Double Fermentation Soy Sauce takes 18 months. As the name implies, there is a secondary fermentation. When making the Bluegrass Soy Sauce, we make a brine of sea salt and limestone-filtered spring water to put our Koji in. For the double fermentation, we use our Bluegrass Soy Sauce instead of the traditional brine, put another Koji in it, and ferment for an additional six months. The usages are the same, but the flavor profiles are extremely different – much deeper, richer flavors.
Each brewery had a smoked soy sauce, and we were already set up to smoke spices, so we started smoking our Bluegrass Soy Sauce. Smoke is umami, and combined with the soy sauce, it just intensifies it. We have to be careful not to oversmoke this one. My daughter was 11 or 12 at the time and tasted it and nailed the flavor profile. She said right away, “tastes like a country ham sandwich,” and she was dead on. That’s now how we describe it in our tasting. It’s got the smokiness and all the notes that Bluegrass sauce had – the meaty and brothiness, the funk that you find in country ham, and then with the added smoke. Again, usage is the same, but the flavor will change in a different way. I like adding it to soups and ramen and just little drops in a dramatic way on sushi or any meat.
Ponzu was another variation I saw a lot while touring soy sauce breweries in Japan. Traditional Ponzu has yuzu in it; not much of yuzu is grown in the US. Our Ponzu is a Lemonade out of Lemon’s story. We were making another product that required us to hand-peel about 400 lemons at a time just to use the peel. I hate waste and love efficiency, so we started pressing the lemons for the juice. I said, “Let’s make a Ponzu and use lemon juice.” Another nod to our brand is that traditional Ponzu uses sake, and we use 100-proof Old Forester in our Ponzu.
Again, the usage will be the same, but the flavor is completely different from the Bluegrass Soy Sauce. The Japanese are masters at creating umami—Ponzu has everything, from the sweet, salty bite to vinegar, heat from some cayenne, and funk from some fish flake. It’s got the brightness from the cold-pressed lemon juice. It’s a great dipping sauce.
I would love to continue extending this line, and that’s what we’re working on now. I’m really proud of what we have to offer. If you come in to take a tour, we do a taste right afterward, and you get to taste each one of these soy sauces.
