Chichibu 2011 – Peated (LMDW)

In the Saitama mountains northwest of Tokyo, Chichibu has made malt whisky since 2008 under Ichiro Akuto and his Venture Whisky company. Wide day to night temperature swings drive the wood interaction, which is why Chichibu reads older than its years suggest. The distillery ferments in washbacks built from Japanese mizunara oak, where native lactobacilli add fruit and a light incense note to the wash. 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 5 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. The malt was kilned over peat, so phenols give a firm medicinal smoke and ash over the fruit. The smoke sits over a fruity core, the phenols and the orchard fruit trading places as it opens.

This bottling was distilled in 2011, from cask 1401 and bottled in 2016. It is a run of 264 bottles, released for France, bottled by La Maison du Whisky. It is the kind of single cask that built the distillery's reputation among collectors in barely more than a decade. Bottled at 61.3%, it rewards a drop of water to open the fruit.