Chichibu The Peated – 10th Anniversary 2018

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. Water comes off the Arakawa river system, filtered through the surrounding mountains to a clean mineral balance that lets the fruit and oak show. 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. Only 5 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. The smoke sits over a fruity core, the phenols and the orchard fruit trading places as it opens.

This bottling was distilled in 2013 and bottled in 2018. It is a run of 11550 bottles. It is the kind of single cask that built the distillery's reputation among collectors in barely more than a decade. Bottled at 55.5%, natural colour and not chill filtered.