Chichibu London Edition 2025

Ichiro Akuto built Chichibu in 2008 in a landlocked basin in Saitama, carrying forward a distilling line that ran back through the lost Hanyu distillery. Chichibu loses roughly three to five per cent of each cask a year to evaporation, near double the Scottish rate, so a young whisky here carries the depth of a much older one. Water comes off the Arakawa river system, filtered through the surrounding mountains to a clean mineral balance that lets the fruit and oak show.

This is unpeated single malt, matured in ex-bourbon American oak and finished in an Oloroso sherry cask. With no age statement it rests entirely on the cask, where vanillin reads as vanilla and oak lactones as coconut, the fast Chichibu maturation giving more than the years would suggest. Ex-bourbon vanillin reads as vanilla and oak lactones as coconut, while the Oloroso gives dried fruit and a walnut nuttiness. The spirit character stays fruit forward, apple and pear over a soft, malty body and a gentle spice.

This release was drawn from the distillery's own stock and bottled in 2025. It is a run of 1920 bottles, released for UK. It is the kind of single cask that built the distillery's reputation among collectors in barely more than a decade. Bottled at 50.5%, it rewards a drop of water to open the fruit.