Chichibu The Peated

Chichibu sits in a mountain basin in Saitama, northwest of Tokyo, where Ichiro Akuto fired the stills in 2008 under his Venture Whisky company. The basin climate swings from humid summers near 35 degrees to winters below freezing, so the casks expand and contract hard and the spirit takes on wood faster than it would in Scotland. 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 and finished in an Oloroso sherry cask. 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, while the Oloroso gives dried fruit and a walnut nuttiness. Peat in the malting adds phenols, reading as wood smoke and a light medicinal note above the orchard fruit. Past the medicinal smoke the spirit stays sweet and fruity, a balance of ash and stone fruit.

This release was drawn from the distillery's own stock and bottled in 2022. It is a run of 11000 bottles. Each cask is bottled on its own terms, a snapshot of how a particular wood shaped the Saitama spirit. Bottled at 53.5%, natural colour and not chill filtered.