Unlike the craft Japanese distillers and the sizeable Japanese whisky distilling giants, Yamazakura's whiskies sit somewhere in between. Their whiskies have circulated Japan for quite some time, and yet it's a distillery that's never really gotten around to gaining a proper foothold and establishing itself as a producer of choice, and that's not for a lack of trying - that is until now.

With the Asaka brand of whisky having been inaugurated in 2016, it seems like Tohoku's first licensed whiskymaker is now ready to start over, just 250 years in. 

So who is Asaka, Yamazakura and what's it got to do with Cherry whisky?

The Road To Whiskymaking Is Filled With Detours

For one, they all come from Sasanokawa Shuzo, a Sake and Shochu maker based in Koriyama, Fukushima, that goes all the way back to 1765.

After World War II, the company had decided on the back of a scarcity of rice (rice was rationed and thus making Sake with rice wasn't exactly looked well upon) to get into whisky-making. This was further encouraged the westerners who had begun to inhabit Japan post-war, who had a big thirst for whiskies from back home that weren't as available all the way in Japan. And thus Sasanokawa would quickly apply for a whisky-making license which they got in 1946. Of course given the lack of expertise in whiskymaking back then, what the distillery could produce would barely be considered whisky today - they would nevertheless name their product Cherry whisky, which they took from their old name "Yamazakura", directly translated as "Mountain Cherry Blossoms", which they considered was a blissful name for Japan's recovery in the post-war years; and the shortened "Cherry" simply sounded more hip.

Yet as the economy began to recovery, the distillery had wanted to also improve the quality of the spirits they produced, and thus would try repeatedly to recreate makeshift pot stills with whatever they could wrestle up. In the off seasons when Sake wasn't being made, the brewery/distillery would turn to trying to make whisky. 

Yet after repeated tries in the 1980's and none working out, the distillery would get the ingenious idea to import casks of Scotch whisky - yet it wasn't the Scotch whisky that they were after, it was in fact the wood that made up the casks! As it turns out, it was cheaper to buy fully filled casks of whisky from Scotland than to buy empty new casks. Nevertheless, the distillery came upon the idea to use that imported Scotch whisky and mix it in with Sasanokawa's own whisky and put it back into the wooden casks to further age, alongside with some added molasses spirit. This turned out to be a huge hit, and would even put Sasanokawa as amongst the top three craft whisky makers in Japan, along with Hombo Shuzo (Mars Whisky) and Toa Shuzo (Hanyu).

Saving Hanyu Casks And Racking Up Some Good Karma

Nevertheless as the decade came to a close, the boom time in whiskies seemed to also began to dim, and thus Sasanokawa themselves would pretty much stop production as they already had decades worth of stock on hand to tide them through. Yet not all distilleries were so fortunate - Hanyu's Toa Shuzo would find itself going out of business and would go on sale in 2004, wherein its acquirers had no interest in the whiskies it had on hand and that's when one Ichiro Akuto had decided to quit his job and salvage all of his grandfather's whiskies. Ichiro Akuto is of course now the man behind the cult Japanese distillery Chichibu, and Toa Shuzo was in fact his grandfather's distillery. As the new owners of Toa Shuzo had intended to dump all of the remaining Hanyu whiskies, Ichiro would step in to save them and when he needed somewhere to store them until his own distillery was up, Sasanokawa would provide him valuable storage space. It's said that even till this day, some of the racks in Sasanokawa's warehouses show marks of having been modified to fit Hanyu's whiskies.

Finally On The Road To Japanese Single Malt Making

As the late-2000's rolled around and whiskies started becoming in vogue again, the company would put out a new, more premium range of blends, which they called Yamazakura, as per their traditional name. These were "pure malt" blended expressions per the company's branding. Yet as a decade passed and the company's 250th anniversary was dawning upon them, the company's president Tetsuzo Yamaguchi seemed to begin feeling a greater sense of duty to properly produce quality Japanese whiskies once again - after all, Japanese whiskies were starting to seriously pick up, and the expertise to do didn't seem so distant, with the climate and landscape in Japan having changed drastically. Of course, having the rockstar of Japanese whiskies Ichiro Akuto offer to train the staff at Sasanokawa played a big role in the decision as well - it seems like the least Ichiro could do after the generous treatment from Sasanokawa towards his grandfather's whiskies.

And so Sasanokawa would set up a new distillery named Asaka. They would send several of their staff to Chichibu Distillery for training, and would order in their pot stills from local maker Miyake (as Forsyths would mean a four year wait! And a local maker would be used to producing equipment that could tolerate Tohoku's harsh weather, making maintenance easier as well), fitting it all in a refurbished Sake storage warehouse, with even a Sake fermentation tank being repurposed as a washback. All aspects of the whiskymaking would have to be done in the little warehouse, and by 2016, Asaka Distillery would officially start making whisky spirit.

Given the distillery's compact size, yearly production remains fairly small. Malted barley from the UK is used, with most of the whiskies being non-peated, and just 10% of its production being heavily peated whiskies. Fermentation initially took place in enamel-coated steel tanks which were once used for Sakes, but more recently have been swapped out to Oregon pine washbacks. Distillers yeast is used, although the distillery has been known to toy with Sake yeasts as well, drawing on their Sake-making experience. Fermentation is done for an extended 90 hours, with distillation taking place in a pair of small twin pot stills.

Its first fully qualified Japanese single malt whisky expression, Asaka The First, was released in 2019, ahead of the newest wave of craft Japanese distillers. Since then, numerous single casks have also been released, some also interestingly featuring Sakura cask and IPA cask finishes.

Kanpai!

@111hotpot