Chichibu Ichiro’s Malt – The Peated 4 Years Old 2012

Chichibu is a small Saitama distillery started in 2008 by Ichiro Akuto, founder of Venture Whisky and heir to the Hanyu distilling family. 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 make is double distilled in copper pot stills built by Forsyths, from mostly unpeated barley, and matured on site in dunnage warehouses. The house style is clean and fruity from unpeated barley, which makes the peated bottlings a distinct strand rather than the norm.

This is peated single malt, matured in ex-bourbon American oak. Only 4 years old, it leans on early wood extraction, vanillin and oak lactones to the fore, though Chichibu's fast maturation gives it more weight than the age implies. 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 2012 and bottled in 2016. It is a run of 6350 bottles, released for Japan. Each cask is bottled on its own terms, a snapshot of how a particular wood shaped the Saitama spirit. Bottled at 54.5%, natural colour and not chill filtered.