Distillery
Chichibu
When Ichiro Akuto opened Chichibu in 2008, in the mountains of Saitama in Japan. It was the first new whisky distillery the country had licensed in roughly 35 years. Akuto had founded Venture Whisky a few years earlier, partly to rescue stock from his family's old Hanyu distillery. Building his own place was the next step. Chichibu is small and deliberately hands-on. A tiny team malts local barley on the floor, stirs the mash by hand and watches the copper stills closely to catch the right cut. Akuto even brought in a retiring cooper to set up an on-site cooperage. The distillery is best known for its love of mizunara, a prized Japanese oak. Akuto has attended the mizunara auctions since 2010, and uses the wood for casks. He went a step further by building some of his washbacks from mizunara too, which is almost unheard of.
