Chichibu Ichiro’s Malt – Chibidaru 4 Years Old 2010

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. Production is small, around a third of a million litres a year, with floor malting done by hand on occasion and every stage run under one roof. The make is double distilled in copper pot stills built by Forsyths, from mostly unpeated barley, and matured on site in dunnage warehouses.

This is unpeated single malt, matured in ex-bourbon American oak. At 4 years the wood is still giving up its first sugars and spice, vanillin reading as vanilla, with the sharp seasonal swings speeding the exchange. Ex-bourbon vanillin reads as vanilla and oak lactones as coconut. The palate leans on tropical and orchard fruit, mango and apple, with a clean cereal note beneath.

This bottling was distilled in 2010 and bottled in 2014. It is a run of 6200 bottles. Each cask is bottled on its own terms, a snapshot of how a particular wood shaped the Saitama spirit. Bottled at 53.5%, natural colour and not chill filtered. It remains one of the most collected names in modern Japanese whisky.