Blue Rabbit Craft Spirits
A HARMONIOUS BLEND OF TWO CULTURES
We make every drop of our craft spirits right here in the heart of Tokyo. We use a state-of-the-art 100 litre stainless steel still from a leading craft distilling manufacturer in the Netherlands.
All the spirits at Blue Rabbit Distillery are produced, bottled, labelled and packaged by hand here at the Distillery. Each bottle produced is sealed with a natural wooden top branded with the Distillery logo and dressed with a neck label, then individually numbered and signed by our Distiller.
We use a selection of botanicals from both Japan and Europe. All the botanicals and raw materials for our spirits are carefully selected for us and sent directly from our supplier in the U.K. to the Distillery where they are prepared in the secret recipes for our spirits.
GINS
To create the balance and harmony that signifies the Blue Rabbit Gin brand, we use Japanese shochu as the base and infuse into that carefully selected botanicals in our Blue Rabbit Gin and Blue Rabbit Premium Gin. The base botanical that makes our gin unmistakingly a gin, Juniper, is harvested in Italy. It gives Blue Rabbit Gin its characteristic pine and fresh forest notes. From Japan, we use Japanese Yuzu, a citrus fruit, grown in Wakayama Prefecture, as our key flavour element to express the perfumed bouquet of Blue Rabbit Gin. We extract the subtle and unique flavor oils primarily from Japanese Cypress wood, yuzu citrus, sencha tea leaves, bamboo leaves and ginger. We compliment those flavors with European heather flowers and use orris root to help bind those flavours together. For our Blue Rabbit Premium Gin, we infuse the flavour of juniper together with hinoki (Japanese Cypress), sansho (Japanese Pepper) and lavender flowers to create a delicate floral balance.
VODKA
Blue Rabbit Vodka starts its life as a shochu base and that is purified during the distillation process and is then triple filtered through activated white birch charcoal to ensure a high quality character and silky smooth taste. It is then infused with the fresh citrus flavour of the Japanese yuzu fruit. The result is a delicate citrus character, silky and smooth on the palate.
RUM
Blue Rabbit Rum starts its life in 100lt temperature-controlled stainless steel fermentation tanks. A pre-fermentation 'wort' is created by diluting sugar cane molasses from Okinawa together with some spices before adding yeast and nutrients to initiate a fermentation. After approximately 10 days of fermentation, the now alcoholic rum 'wash' is then transferred to the still, and is distilled, during which the hot alcoholic vapours rise up through the pot still column, carrying the unique spicy flavours of Blue Rabbit Rum. The finished rum is then diluted to bottle strength of 43% abv.
THE BOTTLE
All our bottles are made for us in the province of Treviso, north east Italy. Before our spirits are bottled, each bottle is pressure-sterilised using undiluted base alcohol.
For each of our craft spirits, a beech wood stopper, branded with the Distillery logo, is used and fits perfectly into the neck of the bottle. A shrink-wrap capsule is then heat-sealed over the top to secure the top.
HEAD AND TAIL SMEARING
Each distillation we do is carefully sequenced into three parts:
the heads, the hearts and the tails.
The heads are the first part of the crystal clear liquid which will flow from the condenser on the still, high in strength but poor in flavour. This part is saved to sterilise the bottles, tops and other equipment in the Distillery.
Next comes the hearts cut. This is where the majority of flavour oils are to be found and the key character of Blue Rabbit spirits.
The final part of the spirit to run out of the still is the tails cut. Somewhat less desirable in taste overall as it contains root-like flavours but a little of this rooty tails section is smeared into the hearts to contribute to the overall flavour profile.
Many spirit makers 'recycle' the heads and tails section into future distillation runs but at Blue Rabbit, we remove them from the process altogether.
The result of separating and smearing these parts is a luxuriously smooth and multi-layered spirit of superior quality, making it an ideal spirit to sip on its own, to pour over ice or in a host of wonderful cocktails.