Chuhai

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Chūhai ( Japanese 酎 ハ イ ) is an alcoholic mixed drink popular in Japan, made from a spirit , often from Shōchū , and a soft drink , which is almost always sold ready-made in cans. The alcohol content of the ready-mixed varieties is around 5 - 7 % by volume . The mixing ratio of spirit to soft drink is about 1: 3.

Chūhai could also be called the Japanese version of the alcopops popular in Germany . The word Chūhai is an artificial word made up of Chū (the last syllable of Shōchū ) and hai (from the highball long drink , see story).

In Japanese pubs you don't order a Chūhai, but a “Sour” ( サ ワ ー , sawā ) to get something Chūhai-like.

history

After the Second World War, alcohol in bombed-out Japanese cities was of such poor quality that it became commonplace in pubs to mix it with sweet lemonades just to get it down.

As Japan recovered economically, imported spirits, especially whiskey , also became popular as a status symbol . In Japan, the most popular serving form was the highball, whiskey sprinkled with soda water .

The Chūhai arose from these two tendencies, namely to cover up the strong liquor taste with lemonades and at the same time to make it carbonated .

Asahi Brewery was the first to bring a Chūhai onto the market in 1983. But it wasn't until the first canned Chūhai, the "Lemon Chūhai" (lemon Chūhai) made by Takara with 7% alcohol, that the drink began to slowly rise. It was practically the first stronger drink that you could simply take home with you on the long commute and drink on the train without having to reach for the very cheap-looking disposable glass cups with rice wine like the homeless .

The Lemon-Chūhai from Takara tastes very tart, almost bitter and for years (also because of the commuters) it had the stigma of cheap fusel to get drunk quickly (relatively high alcohol content compared to the price).

Current Chūhai boom

Only in the last few years have other manufacturers brought out chūhais. Practically all classes of society drink chūhai these days; In supermarkets, beer and chūhai now share the refrigerated shelf for alcoholic beverages 50:50. There is now a huge range, including cardboard-sweet lychee chūhais or "sparkling wine" chūhais, which imitate the sparkling wine taste with grape juice , vodka , carbonic acid and, above all, sugar .

This Chūhai boom is partly related to the Happoshu boom, in which beer, which is very expensive due to taxes in Japan, is replaced by cheaper "hop foam drinks", but also with the Shōchū boom (Shōchū displaces rice wine). Due to the shortage of shōchū due to the high demand, fewer and fewer chūhai contain real shōchū, but more and more vodka or other liqueurs, so that one can hardly speak of chūhai in the narrower sense.

In Japanese , Chu-Hai also means "(smacking) kiss" + "high (drug)"; the associations with the effect of the drink are certainly not completely unfounded.