Akkeshi

Akkeshi was built to answer one question: could Japan make whisky like Islay's? The distillery sits two kilometres from Akkeshi Bay on the cold eastern coast of Hokkaido, where the water runs peaty and the summers bring thick sea fog. It is owned by Kenten Jitsugyo, a Tokyo trading company whose president set out to make whisky like Islay's, and it began distilling in 2016.

The bottle names come from the sekki, the 24 solar terms of the traditional Japanese calendar. Each release is named for one of them, which is why the bottles we track are called Taisetsu, Boshu, Ritto, Seimei, Usui, Shosho, Daikan and Taisho rather than by age or cask. Akkeshi does not publish bottle by bottle whether each one meets the Japanese whisky labelling standard.

The stills are a pair of onion-shaped pot stills from Forsyths in Scotland, 5,000 litres for the first distillation and 3,600 for the second, fed from six stainless steel washbacks with a five day fermentation.

The water comes from the upper reaches of the Ohoro River, soft and peaty. Most of the barley is English, but Akkeshi also uses Ryofu, a two-row barley grown locally, and has malted some itself since installing a drum maltings in 2021.

The climate does the rest. Temperatures run from about 22 degrees in summer to minus 12 in winter, and the sea fog that rolls in through July and August carries salt onto the casks in the four warehouses.