Mizuwari

Mizuwari (水割り) is a way of drinking whiskey or shouchu. Ingredient-wise it’s basically whisky, water and ice. The interesting part is that it calls for a precise number of stirs at certain stages of making the cocktail. This is corroborated by Nonjatta, The Whiskypedia, The Star Online and many others.

The number of stirs given by most sources is 13 and half after you pour whisky over the ice and three and a half times after you add water. Nonjatta in his blog post quotes Nikkei mizuwari and Suntory mizuwari. The last quoted page is Japanese Wikipedia for 水割り which contains no references.

Another source I found - Alcademics quotes Neyah White, Suntory brand ambassador. Off to the Suntory page we go. Strangely enough, Suntory’s page tells you to „gently stir” the cocktail.

Extensive googling provided me with another possible source Japanese Cocktails by Yuri Kato (Amazon) which is mostly sold out or fetches incredible prices (100+ USD for a copy) so that’s out.

Where does the recipe come from then? Is there any reason for the exact number of stirs or is it there for the ceremony itself?

Update 2024-09-09

I realized that Web Archive exists for a reason and Suntory mizuwari contains the stir 13 times among the instructions. I also explored Nikkei mizuwari which leads to a very comfy website called My Mizuwari. In there one of the bartenders working at Le Zinc says to stir at least 10 times. I didn’t expect it to be easy, but the more I dig, the less sense this makes.