Fresh lychee and rose water hit first, startlingly floral for a sweet-potato spirit, backed by pear and apple. The palate is soft and almost creamy, carrying that lychee-rose thread into a fluffy, perfumed mid-palate.
Sweet potato shochu naturally carries a faint lychee-like aroma, but it's normally so subtle it gets buried under the earthier, starchier notes of the spirit. Hamada Syuzou's R&D distillery, Denzouingura, spent years trying to isolate and amplify that one compound instead of suppressing it: they developed an aged sweet potato varietal called kojuku-imo, fermented it with black koji, and distilled it under a proprietary vacuum method that preserves the aromatics a standard atmospheric still would drive off.
