Chichibu 8 Years Old 2015 Cask #4701 (LMDW)

In the Saitama mountains northwest of Tokyo, Chichibu has made malt whisky since 2008 under Ichiro Akuto and his Venture Whisky company. The distillery ferments in washbacks built from Japanese mizunara oak, where native lactobacilli add fruit and a light incense note to the wash. Wide day to night temperature swings drive the wood interaction, which is why Chichibu reads older than its years suggest. 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. Around 8 years in, the fruit esters and the wood have married, and the accelerated ageing gives a depth a Scottish whisky might reach much later. Ex-bourbon vanillin reads as vanilla and oak lactones as coconut. Kilned with heavy peat, it carries dense phenolic smoke and ash, the fruit pushed beneath a tarry, medicinal weight. Beneath the smoke the Chichibu fruit holds on, apple and honey rising against the ash on the finish.

This bottling was distilled in 2015, from cask 4701 and bottled in 2023. It is a run of 192 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. At 63.3% it drinks well neat, with water settling the oak.