Chichibu Ichiro’s Malt – The First 3 Years Old 2008

Founded in 2008 by Ichiro Akuto, Chichibu has risen fast from a small mountain distillery to one of the most sought names in Japanese whisky. Water comes off the Arakawa river system, filtered through the surrounding mountains to a clean mineral balance that lets the fruit and oak show. 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.

This is unpeated single malt, matured in ex-bourbon American oak. At 3 years the spirit is in its extractive phase, pulling vanillin, oak lactones and colour quickly from the wood, which the basin's heat and cold drive harder than a cool maritime warehouse would. 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 bottling was distilled in 2008 and bottled in 2011. It is a run of 7400 bottles. It is the kind of single cask that built the distillery's reputation among collectors in barely more than a decade. Bottled at 61.8%, it rewards a drop of water to open the fruit.