Chichibu London Edition 2019

In the Saitama mountains northwest of Tokyo, Chichibu has made malt whisky since 2008 under Ichiro Akuto and his Venture Whisky company. Wide day to night temperature swings drive the wood interaction, which is why Chichibu reads older than its years suggest. 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. Without an age statement the cask does the talking, esters and vanillin building fruit and vanilla over a young but quickly matured spirit. 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 2019. It is a run of 1405 bottles. From a distillery still in its first generation, bottlings like this show how far Chichibu has come in a short time. At 48.5% it drinks well neat, with water settling the oak. It remains one of the most collected names in modern Japanese whisky.