The Tastiest Japanese Cocktails to Make at Home

A friend recently asked me about the best cocktail I have ever tasted. It’s a tough question to answer—a bit like trying to rank your finest romance or concert. But in recent memory, one drink stands out: a whiskey highball at the lobby bar of the Kobe Kitano Hotel, a Relais & Châteaux property in Japan. 

I favor cocktails with well-defined, clean flavors and the whiskey highball has only four elegantly harmonized ingredients: ice, whiskey, sparkling water, and a spritz of fresh citrus. This particular highball featured Yamazaki 18—a bottled symphony of bitter chocolate, dark fruit, and vanilla. The bubbles made the delicate flavors dance on my palate as gracefully as Noh actors on the imperial stage. 

The ambiance and context lent as much joy as the delicacies in question. Before the whiskey highball nightcap, I had spent the day exploring Kobe, an ancient Japanese port city and an entrepot of Chinese, Korean, and Dutch sailors for centuries. Lunch was Kobe beef sukiyaki, and the afternoon found me soaking in the fabled onsens of nearby Arima, a hot springs village extolled in the verses of the Zen poet Basho. Dinner at the Kobe Kitano Hotel was a French-inspired feast laden with generous cuts of the eponymous marbled beef. 

Before leaving the Land of the Rising Sun, I picked up an extra suitcase to bring home a few choice whiskeys and sakes. Since then, I have been trying my hand at replicating the cocktails I enjoyed in Tokyo, Kobe, and Kyoto. My mixology skills pale in comparison to the highly trained bartenders I met in Japan, but it’s hard to mess up when you’re working with fine Japanese whiskey, sake, and fresh yuzu. 

Here are my favorite Japanese cocktails to make at home. Savor them while contemplating the autumn moon with a book of Basho poems or in a hot bath with onsen salts and hinoki oil.

To sharpen my Japanese cocktail game, I chatted with Chef Robb Lucas of Koi Restaurant, a celebrated sushi counter in Manhattan. Lucas, whose mother is Japanese, emphasized the importance of seasonal ingredients. “The concept of shun, or seasonality, permeates Japanese culture writ large but is especially important in food,” Lucas told me over a round of Hibiki old-fashioneds in Koi’s dining room in Soho. In autumn, mixologists favor persimmons and chestnut liqueurs, while winter calls for peated whiskeys, like Akkeshi from Hokkaido, to ward off the chill. Summer is the season for lighter whiskeys and sparkling sake cocktails.

One of Lucas’s favorite bases for Japanese cocktails is shochu, a clear spirit usually made from barley or sweet potatoes. Shochu has more heat than sake, and its bold flavor complements fruits and sweet ingredients. Mix shochu with ice and chilled oolong tea for a Nipponified remix of an espresso martini—a boozy refresher with a subtle caffeinated buzz. 

While yuzu and sake are increasingly available in mainstream U.S. supermarkets, specialty items like shochu or persimmon may require a visit to H-Mart or another Asian grocery. Since Japanese cocktails often require fewer ingredients, quality is paramount—especially when it comes to ice. For crystal-clear, pristine ice cubes, Lucas recommends freezing water in silicone ice trays.

If you have seen the movie Lost in Translation, the whiskey highball is the drink Bill Murray tipples as he wanders through the neon jungle of Tokyo. Come to think of it, the whiskey highball kinda is the Bill Murray of cocktails—universally beloved by highbrow and lowbrow drinkers alike. In Japan, you’ll find highballs everywhere, from the most coveted Michelin-starred restaurants and five-star hotels to gas stations and vending machines. 

Like a pithy haiku, the highball is beautiful in its simplicity. You can whip one up in just minutes. Make sure to have high-quality whiskey, good ice, and a highball glass on hand. For a special treat, I mix Yamazaki 18 into my highballs. Another superb, and more affordable, option is Kanosuke, a whiskey redolent of vanilla and gardenia flowers. If you can find it, Zuza, Thai sparkling water lightly flavored with Asian citrus varieties like yuzu and calamansi, is the effervescent agua par excellence for highballs. 

Chill your highball glass in the freezer for 30 minutes. Add fresh ice cubes to the glass. Pour the whiskey over the ice and stir gently. Slowly pour soda water down the side of the glass to maintain carbonation. Give the drink one or two gentle stirs to combine. Garnish with a citrus twist or slice of yuzu.

Whenever I catch a whiff of yuzu’s bracing, citrusy perfume, I’m teleported back to a night market in Tokyo or an open-air market in a seaside village in Yamaguchi. The Yuzu ginger spritz is another two-minute cocktail that tastes like a billion Yen. 

SummerFall Yuzu Bubbles, a sparkling sake made in California, is refreshing on its own, but the gingery bite of Domaine de Canton, a ginger liqueur from France, makes for one of the most revivifying cocktails in my repertoire. I drink this citrusy sparkler year-round, but it’s particularly delightful when the weather gets hot.  

Chill your glass in the freezer for 30 minutes. Add ice and pour in SummerFall Yuzu. Add Domaine de Canton to taste. Garnish with lemon, yuzu, or candied ginger.

Soy sauce in a cocktail, you say? Bro, sounds like someone raided the kitchen at 2 a.m. after watching The Big Lebowski. Well, hear me out: I once viewed soy sauce as merely a noble condiment for sushi and Panda Express combo platters, but then I tried it in gelato, and—even more of a mind-blower—in cocktails. It’s like mixology black magic: a hit of good soy sauce launches cocktails’ umami profile into the Pure Land Heaven of the Amitabha Buddha. 

Kikkoman works in a pinch, but artisanal soy sauce without any wheat additives adds a more nuanced umami tang. I keep a bottle of San-J Tamari, a premium soy sauce from Mie Prefecture, in my fridge for this cocktail. For Scotch, go with light, fruity whiskeys like Benriach’s Original Ten or Glenglassaugh Sandend. 

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir until well-chilled. Strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube. Garnish with a lemon peel.

A nip of Hibiki Harmony, a whiskey as perfumed as a spring picnic in a cherry blossom grove, first ignited my zeal for Japanese whiskey. Southerner that I am, bourbon is as comforting to me as mother’s milk, but I pour Hibiki when I’m in the mood for a superb whiskey with exotic flavors like sakura flower and sandalwood. 

The Hibiki Old Fashioned, a perennial cocktail on chef Lucas’s menu at Koi, is as easy to make as a traditional bourbon old-fashioned. I use a small spoonful of honey and a light touch with the bitters, as I want to smell and savor Hibiki’s delicate tasting notes as fully as possible. A flamed orange peel works fine for the garnish, but go with a yuzu rind if you have one. 

Chill a rocks glass by filling it with ice or placing it in the freezer. In a mixing glass, combine whiskey, bitters, and maple syrup. Stir with ice for 20–30 seconds. Strain into the prepared glass over a large ice cube. Garnish with a twist of orange or yuzu peel and a maraschino cherry.

I splurged a few weeks ago and did the 17-course omakase tasting menu at Sushi by Scratch in New York City. After a parade of sashimi, sakes, and matcha-infused bonbons, the Farewell Tea Ceremony cocktail was the final exclamation point on the meal. I was so enamored with this hot sake concoction that I tipped the waitress 30 percent to have her wrangle the recipe from Sushi by Scratch’s sake sommelier. Like mulled wine, the infused hot sake settles the stomach after a hearty meal. The Farewell Tea Ceremony is my favorite wintertime Japanese cocktail, and I like to pretend I’m at a ski lodge in Niigata, the Japanese Alps, when I drink one in my apartment. 

Combine all ingredients in a heat-safe vessel and place it in simmering water. Heat for 2–3 minutes. Pour into a hot sake cup and serve warm.

Like George Strait, all my exes live in Texas—which means, for good or ill, I find myself in Houston a few times per year. America’s most diverse city, HTX is a gastronomic laboratory where the cuisines of the South, Latin America, and East Asia collide and mingle. On a recent sojourn, I enjoyed one of the best whiskey cocktails I’ve had in recent memory at Kira, a sleek new temaki restaurant. 

The Motion Picture Soundtrack is a Nipponified riff on a classic Manhattan, with Toki whiskey infused with roasted sesame seeds. After sampling sesame gelato in Japan, I am now an enthusiastic devotee of these humble tiny seeds—hitherto merely a garnish for my bagels. A light toasting brings out the sweet nutty flavors in sesame seeds, a beautiful complement to the green apple and pear notes in the Toki. This is the most technical and time-intensive cocktail on this list, but the reward is worth the challenge. And if you make it down to H-town, order this libation with Kira’s hazelnut-studded chocolate kakigori—a pairing that’ll make you smile as wide as the Texas sky.

Toast sesame seeds in a dry frying pan, or in the oven for 5 minutes at 350F, being careful not to burn them. Add the toasted sesame seeds to the whiskey and let infuse for 6 hours. Strain through a cheesecloth. Stir together all ingredients and serve over a large ice cube.