Chichibu Ichiro’s Malt – The Peated 4 Years Old 2011

The Chichibu distillery was founded in 2008 by Ichiro Akuto, whose family had distilled at the closed Hanyu plant, and works on a small scale in the Saitama mountains. Production is small, around a third of a million litres a year, with floor malting done by hand on occasion and every stage run under one roof. The distillery ferments in washbacks built from Japanese mizunara oak, where native lactobacilli add fruit and a light incense note to the wash. Most Chichibu is unpeated, so a peated release is a deliberate exception, the malt kilned over peat before it ever reaches the still.

This is peated single malt, matured in ex-bourbon American oak. Only 4 years old, it leans on early wood extraction, vanillin and oak lactones to the fore, though Chichibu's fast maturation gives it more weight than the age implies. Ex-bourbon vanillin reads as vanilla and oak lactones as coconut. The malt was kilned over peat, so phenols give a firm medicinal smoke and ash over the fruit. Beneath the smoke the Chichibu fruit holds on, apple and honey rising against the ash on the finish.

This bottling was distilled in 2011 and bottled in 2015. It is a run of 5980 bottles. From a distillery still in its first generation, bottlings like this show how far Chichibu has come in a short time. Bottled at 62.5%, natural colour and not chill filtered.