Asaka Yamazakura 2016 – New Born Cask #6226

Asaka sits in Fukushima's Nakadori basin, where hot summers and freezing, wind driven winters make casks expand and contract sharply and the spirit takes on wood fast. The distillery, run by the Koriyama sake house Sasanokawa Shuzo, refitted for whisky in 2016 and released these New Born single casks in 2017 to show its raw distillate before it had aged into whisky.

Because this is new make, only months in wood, it is the distillery's spirit caught early rather than a matured whisky. Held in a first fill ex-bourbon American oak cask, the wood gives early vanilla over the raw spirit. The young distillate shows Asaka's clean, fruity character, malty and bready with a green, cereal edge, while the cask has begun to lend its first colour and sweetness. At 63.3% it is raw and intense, a long way from the rounded house single malt but a clear look at the spirit underneath it.

Cask #6226 was filled in 2016 and bottled the same period in a run of 253, part of the New Born set that the distillery used to show its first distillate across different woods. It is best read with water and curiosity, as a record of where an Asaka whisky begins rather than where it ends. Cask strength, natural colour, not chill filtered.