II. Sole Mio
Spirits Distilled from Koji, cheese pumpkin, puffed millet, kamut, and amaranth.
- 375mL
- 40% Alc. by Vol.
Suggested Serve
2 oz Sole Mio 1.5 oz pineapple juice 0.75 oz coconut cream 0.5 oz lime juice Shake with ice + strain over cracked ice. Fresh juice is fun but not necessary.
To drink on it’s own, sip roughly 1:1 spirit:water to draw out the flavors.
Into the Bottle
II. Solé Mio is our NY interpretation of shōchū, a Japanese spirit that uses Koji to breakdown the starches in the primary ingredients for fermentation. For our second vintage of Solé Mio we went to Treiber Farms to help harvest 8,000 lbs of Long Island Cheese Pumpkin, a sweet and flavorful heirloom variety of pumpkin that was nearly lost before seed savers and Slow Food worked to bring it back. These pumpkins, also known as Cinderella Pumpkins because of their shape, are remarkably sweet and flavorful — they’re perfect for pie.. and they’re perfect for Solé Mio.
We grew the koji for II. Solé Mio on a mixture of puffed grains, including millet, kamut and amaranth. We spent a few days chopping up the pumpkin and steaming, and stomping it into a puree. We milled some organic Oeschner corn into a hot water bath to gelatinize the starches, before cooling it down and adding our fresh koji. We transferred the mash into a fermenter with our steamed pumpkin and some light whiskey yeast. Fermentation lasted about 2 weeks.
We distilled Solé Mio through our copper pot column still and rested it in glass before slowly diluting it with water. The taste is long. It starts off zippy like alcohol and a sour apple candy.. but very quickly turns to corn and squash.. with a long squash and white flower finish.
Enjoy it with some brown sugar and a squeeze of citrus. Even better.. ever made an oleo? Put some sugar (white or brown or whatever you’ve got) into a ziplock with some citrus peels. Order II. Solé Mio. By the time it arrives, hopefully the sugar has absorbed the oils in the citrus peels. That is oleo saccharum. Add a teaspoon of your oleo to 2 oz II. Solé Mio with some bitters. Enjoy at room temp or maybe with a cube of ice. Alternatively, add 1 oz II. Solé Mio to half a teaspoon of oleo and top with 4-5 oz of a sparkling wine.
Cheers!
Leslie