Chichibu

Chichibu is Ichiro Akuto's distillery in the hills of Saitama, and the reason Japan has a craft whisky scene at all. When it opened in 2008 it was the first new whisky distillery licensed in Japan in decades. It is small, hands-on and obsessive about detail, and within a few years its single malts were winning international awards. Akuto has since advised other producers, including Sasanokawa Shuzo, which makes Yamazakura.

The single malts we track are Chichibu's own spirit. Ichiro's Malt & Grain is a different thing and says so on the label: it is sold as a world blended whisky, which means it includes whisky made outside Japan.

Akuto comes from a family of sake brewers whose company, Toa Shuzo, ran the Hanyu distillery. Toa went into financial rehabilitation in 2000 and was sold in 2004, and the new owner planned to get rid of the Hanyu whisky. Akuto borrowed money from relatives and bought the stock himself, storing it at Sasanokawa Shuzo in Fukushima, the makers of Yamazakura.

He founded Venture Whisky in 2004 and sold that Hanyu stock as Ichiro's Malt, including the 54 bottle Card Series released between 2005 and 2014, which has since set auction records. Chichibu was built in 2007 and began distilling in 2008. The First, its first single malt, came out in 2011 and was Whisky Advocate's Japanese Whisky of the Year.

A second distillery, Chichibu Daini, opened in 2019 with about five times the capacity, and a grain distillery at Tomakomai in Hokkaido began production in January 2026. Akuto was inducted into Whisky Magazine's Hall of Fame in 2024.

The original distillery uses a pair of small pot stills of about 2,000 litres made by Forsyths in Scotland, heated indirectly. Its washbacks are made of mizunara, Japanese oak, which is almost unheard of anywhere else.

Most of the barley comes from Britain, but a share is grown on farms around Chichibu and malted at the distillery, using floor malting the staff have studied in the UK. There is also a cooperage on site, so Chichibu can build and repair its own casks.

Chichibu Daini scales the same ideas up, with larger direct-fired Forsyths stills of 10,000 and 7,000 litres and French oak washbacks.