Chichibu The US Edition 2020

Chichibu sits in a mountain basin in Saitama, northwest of Tokyo, where Ichiro Akuto fired the stills in 2008 under his Venture Whisky company. 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. 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. At 5 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 release was drawn from the distillery's own stock and bottled in 2020. It is a run of 2109 bottles, released for USA. From a distillery still in its first generation, bottlings like this show how far Chichibu has come in a short time. At 55.5%, best read neat first, then opened with a little water.