Chichibu Ichiro’s Malt – The Peated 3 Years Old 2009

The Chichibu distillery was founded in 2008 by Ichiro Akuto, whose family had distilled at the closed Hanyu plant, and works on a small scale in the Saitama mountains. Water comes off the Arakawa river system, filtered through the surrounding mountains to a clean mineral balance that lets the fruit and oak show. The basin climate swings from humid summers near 35 degrees to winters below freezing, so the casks expand and contract hard and the spirit takes on wood faster than it would in Scotland. Most Chichibu is unpeated, so a peated release is a deliberate exception, the malt kilned over peat before it ever reaches the still.

This is peated single malt, matured in ex-bourbon American oak. At 3 years the spirit is in its extractive phase, pulling vanillin, oak lactones and colour quickly from the wood, which the basin's heat and cold drive harder than a cool maritime warehouse would. Ex-bourbon vanillin reads as vanilla and oak lactones as coconut. Peat in the malting adds phenols, reading as wood smoke and a light medicinal note above the orchard fruit. The smoke sits over a fruity core, the phenols and the orchard fruit trading places as it opens.

This bottling was distilled in 2009 and bottled in 2012. It is a run of 5000 bottles. Releases at this scale sell out quickly, which is part of why Chichibu has become one of the most traded distilleries in the world. Bottled at 50.5%, natural colour and not chill filtered.