Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Japanese whisky — distilleries, bars, bottles, regions.
Ask anyone who knows a little about Japanese whisky to name a Hokkaido distillery and they’ll say Yoichi. Push them for a second one and most stop talking. Yet the island has at least four working whisky distilleries with visitor programmes, and the youngest of them sits in ski country running gin alongside its single … Read more
In late 2008, a struggling whisky brand started a campaign that would, within 12 months, see the number of Japanese bars pouring whisky and soda jump from roughly 15,000 to more than 60,000. By the end of the next year it was past 80,000. Suntory’s sales of Kakubin, the squat yellow-labelled bottle that gave the … Read more
Yamazaki sells out the moment its booking lottery opens, and you need to apply months ahead. Yoichi runs free tours all day, walk-up tickets sometimes available the same morning. The two most famous Japanese whisky distilleries are 1,500 km apart, run on opposite booking systems, and ask very different things of you as a visitor. … Read more
It’s 21:30 on a Wednesday inside Bar Benfiddich, four floors up a Nishi-Shinjuku building with no English sign. Hiroyasu Kayama, the bar’s owner, is crushing fresh wormwood with a brass pestle to garnish someone else’s drink. In front of me sits a Yoichi 12, neat, with the kind of hand-cut ice ball that costs the … Read more
It’s a Tuesday, half past nine, and I’m at the counter of a fourth-floor walk-up bar in Ginza, watching a bartender carve a sphere of ice with a bread-knife the length of his forearm. The pour costs ¥1,800. The bottle behind him is a thirty-year-old Hibiki, and the back wall is racked four shelves deep … Read more