Shochu

A friend of mine is a shochu expert, so I get chances to try interesting shochu. This one was great value for money too.

Edradour

Edradour, said to be the smallest distillery in Scotland, makes a lot of whiskies with fun concepts. This one started out with a very strong black-tea note, the chronic problem of sherry-cask whiskies, but over time the tea flavor faded away completely and it turned delicious. Great value too, as you’d expect from Signatory.

Cake from Mont St. Clair

To buy a cake from a specialist cake shop you usually have to order two or three days ahead, but lately I’ve been too busy for that, so I end up looking in department stores. Mont St. Clair always has cakes with a taste you can trust, which is convenient.

Something like this…

Caol Ila 15 Year Old

Even though it’s the “unpeated style,” you can feel a touch of peat. The 2014 release doesn’t score that well… but still, it didn’t taste bad at all.

Valentine’s Day chocolate: Yvan Valentin

In Japan it’s sold only as a Valentine’s Day limited edition, and it is seriously expensive… Supposedly it’s the chocolate Hollywood celebrities love…

Inside

The taste really was good. The white chocolate with orange liqueur was the best of the lot. Still, it’s so expensive that I doubt I’ll buy it again…

A gift from Hong Kong

Cookies from Glory Bakery.

Jenny Bakery’s cookies are the famous ones, but these are tasty too. I especially like that you can reuse the tin.

I wonder when I’ll finally get to visit Hong Kong…

Glenfiddich IPA

You get just a faint hint of the IPA; I can’t help wondering what it would’ve been like if it hit you hard the way Chichibu’s does…

Marrons glaces from Sembikiya

Sembikiya makes lots of desserts that are just right as gifts. They taste good too. The only problem is that I bought these as a gift and ended up eating them all myself…

Fruit cake

A notch below a specialist shop’s, but it keeps for a long time, which is nice.

Jelly

Probably because they use good-quality fruit, it’s delicious.

Kimuraya’s S Premium Bread and NUMBER SUGAR jam

I toasted Kimuraya’s premium shokupan and spread it with NUMBER SUGAR’s caramel cream and raspberry cream. The bread was the soft Japanese style, full of that premium feel; the creams weren’t much on their own, but mixed together they became an absolutely perfect flavor.

This was a gift, and it was incredibly good.

Turns out it’s Kizahashi from Toshimaya, the shop famous for Hato Sable…

Rhum Neisson L’Esprit

A Martinique rum I opened while reading Hemingway. I bought it because I’d heard it was great value (and it’s 70% ABV…), and maybe because it’s an agricole it tasted like tequila. Not really my thing, but the quality for the price is very high. It also had that sweetness peculiar to rum.

Royce’ chocolate

I bought it because it was a limited edition; with sakura berry (cherry) and almonds in it, it went really well with whisky.

Wasabeef potato chips

Never thought I’d see these potato chips here… Well, they don’t actually taste like beef… more like galbi-sauce flavor with a hit of wasabi… Anyway, it’s almost the same taste as the ones I used to eat in Japan…

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