About Banshaku

Banshaku (晩酌) is the Japanese word for the drink you have at home in the evening. 晩 is evening and 酌 is the pouring of a drink, and together they describe something pretty specific: not going out, not a big session, just a glass with dinner after work while you wind down. It's an ordinary, everyday sort of ritual, and it's the one this site is named after, because that's when most of us are actually drinking the bottles we spend so much time hunting down.

Buying Japanese whisky in Australia is more of a hassle than it should be. Stock comes and goes without much warning, the same bottle can be a hundred dollars cheaper at a shop two suburbs over, and a fair chunk of what gets advertised as a sale is really just the usual price with a red sticker on it. Unless you're checking half a dozen retailer sites every week, there's no easy way to know whether the price in front of you is any good.

So that's what this site does. Every day we check prices across Australian retailers, and we keep every price we've ever recorded rather than only showing you today's number. That history is the whole point, because when you're looking at a bottle of Hibiki at $189 the useful question isn't what it costs now, it's what it's been sitting at for the last eight months. The price index on each whisky answers that in about two seconds.

You can also set an alert on any bottle you're interested in, and we'll email you when a retailer drops the price, which saves you sitting there refreshing tabs on the off chance something moves. The same goes for bottles that have sold out everywhere. Japanese whisky going out of stock is usually temporary rather than permanent, so rather than checking back every few weeks and eventually giving up, you can just get told when it turns up again.

We only cover Japanese whisky. No scotch, no bourbon, nothing else creeping in around the edges, partly because that's what we drink and partly because doing one category properly is more useful than doing five badly. If you're buying your first bottle and have no idea whether Nikka or Yamazaki is the better starting point, or you've been at this for years and you're chasing an age statement before it disappears for good, the aim is the same either way: less guesswork, less money spent than you needed to.