Umeshu is a Japanese plum liqueur that is great for sipping in the winter. It’s cheap and easy to make yourself, with this treasured family recipe.

Time: 5/5
Don’t expect this to be done until after a couple months in the cupboard

Effort: 2/5
Can you throw things in a jar? You can? Wonderful!

Do It Yourself

Umeshu is a Japanese liqueur that is flavoured with immature plum fruits, which are called ume. Good Umeshu tastes floral, fruity and clean. It should be noticeably sweet, but not overwhelmingly so.

I learned how to make Umeshu from the culinary powerhouse and general force of nature that is my maternal grandmother. Sometimes she makes more than we can drink, and as a result her cupboard gets lined up with Umeshu made in different years, like wine aging in a cellar.

While commercially available Umeshu like Choya and Matsuyuki are often decent, nothing beats Umeshu that you make yourself to suit your own taste. Besides, doing it yourself is easy and costs so much less!

Ume

These start being available in late April or early May. At first you’ll get the green and immature fruit. Over the course of a month, the ume will gradually turn more yellow as they ripen.

Grandma buys ume a week or two after they first appear on the market, so that’s what I do. It’s a good balance to avoid the grassy notes you get from the very early fruit, while also retaining the tartness that you lose as they ripen.

That said, some people like to make Umeshu using the ripe yellow fruit. You get fruitier, floral aromas that way but in my opinion Umeshu isn’t in character if it isn’t noticeably acidic.

Liquor

We make our Umeshu using double-distilled Chinese rice wine (雙蒸 – seung jing or shang jing, literally “double evaporated” or “double steamed”). It’s about 29% alcohol by volume and very similar to Japanese shochu, while being widely available and very affordable where I live. Of course, if you can get cheap and nice Shochu you can just use that. Triple distilled rice wine is closer to 40%. I’ve never tried using triple distilled, but I guess you can use that and make a more concentrated product.

The principle is to choose a relatively strong liquor with a neutral taste, to extract the tastes and smells of the ume fruit. So if you can’t get either shochu or rice wine, you can try vodka or even diluted grain alcohol. Just make sure the alcohol content is about 20-30%, and you should get similar results.

That said, nothing stops you from using whatever you want. I’ve heard folks using red wine, or even whisky, to make their own home brew Umeshu. It’s just that the end product wouldn’t be as clean and refreshing, so I recommend sticking to rice wine or shochu if it’s your first time making Umeshu.

Sweetener

The type of sugar you choose impacts the end results greatly. It’s one of only two sources of flavour in Umeshu, besides the fruit itself. Any tasting notes present in the sweetener will be noticeable in the final product.

Rock sugar is my sugar of choice. I often have it hanging around the pantry because it’s a common ingredient in Chinese desserts (like this sweet pear soup). It tastes similar to brown sugar, while being lighter in colour.

Use any sweetener you like the taste of! There are many opportunities for variation here. But for your first try, I suggest you go with rock sugar like my grandma, or something else similarly mild in flavour to train your palate on.

Container

Begin by deciding what container to use. Any airtight glass vessel will work here, you can make one huge batch in a big jar or divide them across several small jars. Individual mason jars of homemade Umeshu would make a wonderful gift!

Believe me when I say that the lid has to be really airtight. I learned the hard way that otherwise, the alcohol will evaporate off and you will be left with ume juice instead of Umeshu.

Time

Homemade Umeshu is a very festive recipe for me. You only get the 2-3 weeks in May when ume are available to make it, which reminds me that it’s a month away from the Dragon Boat Festival when it’s time to make glutinous rice dumplings (zongji). Then you have to age it for at least 6 months before it’s good to drink, which conveniently works out to about Christmas!

What you see here is the Umeshu right after I got everything into the jar, at one week, and at 6 months. Notice how the sugar dissolves very quickly and the ume starts to float, after which the colour of the liqueur turns a beautiful dark amber as it ages.

While 6 months is a minimum, it continues to improve until 2 to 3 years out after which I feel like it plateaus and further ageing doesn’t make it noticeably better. It will continue to keep for years, however, as long as you keep it in a cool dark place. The alcohol content and the high sugar concentration makes it very inhospitable for microorganisms.

Serving suggestions

Plenty of people like to enjoy Umeshu neat, or on the rocks. However, personally I prefer serving my Umeshu at room temperature. You smell it more that way, because the aromatic chemicals have more energy to turn into vapours and escape the surface of the Umeshu to enter your nose. You might even prefer it warm for the same reason, like the way some sake or mulled wine is served.

I also like to dilute it with water in a 1:1 ratio. Straight rice wine is a bit too strong for me, and the extra splash of water tones things down so I can taste the more subtle notes of the ume fruit.

You can also use it as a base for a cocktail (ume colada, anyone?), add soda water for some fizz, or do what my grandma does and add Sprite!

Dramatis Personae

The exact quantity of ingredients will depend on the volume of your container, but I can give you the ratio:

Ume – 4 parts, in grams

Rice wine – 4 parts, in millilitres 

Sugar – 3 parts, in grams

My jar holds about 3500ml at most. I don’t want to exceed that number, or I won’t be able to fit everything inside. So I prepared 1200g of ume, 1200ml of rice wine and 900g of rock sugar.

That, plus a fork and some elbow grease, is all you need to make Umeshu!

Executive summary

1. Thoroughly wash your glass container(s), hands and other equipment.
2. Wash and drain the ume. Using a fork, remove the stem and poke holes into each fruit.
3. Drop the de-stemmed and hole-poked fruit into the container(s). Add the appropriate amount of sugar and cover with the corresponding amount of rice wine.
4. Seal off the container(s) and leave in a cool, dark place for at least 6 months.
5. After ageing for a sufficiently long period of time, open and enjoy! Re-seal any leftovers and keep in a similarly cool, dark place.

Play by Play

Begin by washing your jars and the ume. Look at the little dark pit in the divot of this fruit – that will give off acrid flavours if we let that sit in the rice wine.

So we get rid of the little stem, like so. The twines of a fork are the best tool for this job.

Since you already have a fork in your hand, move straight to the next step of poking holes into the fruit. I don’t know what this does, but it’s what grandma does. One day I might A/B test this to see why.

Plop each ume into the jar as you finish fenestrating it. This is the most time consuming step, and it helps to have a friend doing it with you. You get an extra pair of hands which halves the time it takes, and time spent in conversation passes by quicker.

Sugar in, now that the ume are in place. You may have to shake the jar a bit to help the sugar settle. The rock sugar will easily dissolve once we add the rice wine, so all we need to do is make sure we can close the lid.

Next we top up the jar with the Chinese rice wine. You can already see the rock sugar settle as it dissolves.

Into the depths of my cupboard it goes. The lighting is atrocious and the photo quality consequently horrible, but that’s how you know the Umeshu is in the right place.

Here it is, just a week later. The ume tends to wrinkle up and float to the top as tall the sugar dissolves and draws water out of them.

Here we are during a Christmas gathering that we turned into an Umeshu tasting party. Time to sample the goods!

Try a sip of it neat, then add a splash of water and see how you like it. Cheers!

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