16 Whisky Magazine | Issue 167
Japan Exclusive Yasato Distillery
F
or nearly 200 years, Kiuchi
Shuzo has been making
sake in the town of Naka,
in Ibaraki prefecture,
120km northeast of Tokyo. Not
afraid of a little challenge, the
company spearheaded the craft beer
movement in Japan from the mid-90s
onwards, and in 2016, they started
dabbling in whisky, too. Using a
small hybrid still in a corner of their
Hitachino Nest Brewery, the staff at
Kiuchi Shuzo started making micro-
batches of whisky on an occasional
basis. Away from the public eye,
nobody was quite sure what sort of
weird and wonderful things they
were up to at Nukada Distillery.
As it turned out, Kiuchi Shuzo
was working on something much
bigger, too: a larger, stand-alone
whisky distillery located in the town
of Yasato, near Mt Tsukuba. Keen
β
preview of the new distillery ahead
β
ǡ
to twist the arm of the good folk at
Kiuchi Shuzo and so it is, on a sunny
Tuesday morning in early March,
β
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The new fledgling
WORDS & PICTURES STEFAN VAN EYCKEN
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