Whisky - UK (2020-05)

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

–‘‘ˆˆ‡”‘—””‡ƒ†‡”•–Š‡˜‡”›β‹”•–

preview of the new distillery ahead

‘ˆ–Š‡‘ˆβ‹…‹ƒŽ‘’‡‹‰ǡ™‡ƒƒ‰‡†

to twist the arm of the good folk at

Kiuchi Shuzo and so it is, on a sunny

Tuesday morning in early March,

–Šƒ–™‡⋐†‘—”•‡Ž˜‡•ƒ‹‰‘—”

1HVW%UHZHU\WDNHVÀLJKWWRZDUGVDJHQXLQHO\QHZNLQGRIZKLVN\

The new fledgling

WORDS & PICTURES STEFAN VAN EYCKEN

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