The Process

We begin by sourcing beautiful fresh California ume fruit from a bevy of local farms. Once the ume has arrived at the distillery, we de-stem each fruit individually by hand to preclude the influence of stem tannins. We then load the ripe fruit into a vat with our house-made St. George California Shochu and organic cane sugar to infuse for approximately one  year.

After maceration, we transfer the umeshu into used American whiskey barrels and French oak wine casks, and age it using a dynamic solera-inspired system we’ve been growing for over a decade. 

The casks then go on to new life as finishing casks for our Baller American Single Malt Whiskey. We also used umeshu casks to finish a portion of our St. George 40th Anniversary Single Malt Whiskey.

The backstory:

The story of our umeshu requires rewinding the clock back to 2015, when we were developing our Baller American Single Malt Whiskey. During the R&D period, we discovered that finishing the whiskey in umeshu casks imparted all sorts of stone fruit and floral notes that helped create the Baller whiskey of our dreams. The only problem? We needed umeshu casks, which meant we needed to make umeshu.

Few farms grow ume in California, and the fruit is very sensitive to heat as it nears harvest time in the spring. Over the years, as our Baller whiskey program grew, we sourced California ume fruit when we could get it and made more umeshu as often as we could. Some years we weren’t able to source any fruit of the quality we needed. When we were able to get fruit, we made more umeshu, and that umeshu eventually went into a solera-type system that blended multiple vintages. 

We’d sip the umeshu from time to time and marvel at how delicious it was, but it wasn’t until now that we felt we had enough to bottle and make available for others to try. It’s with great pleasure that we are finally able to share something that we’ve been enjoying for years.