Yamazakura

Yamazakura is the whisky of Sasanokawa Shuzo, a sake brewer in Koriyama, Fukushima, founded in 1765. The company has made whisky since 1946, the first in the Tohoku region, and in 2016 it opened the Asaka distillery to mark its 250th anniversary.

It also has a part in the Chichibu story. When Ichiro Akuto bought the stock of the closed Hanyu distillery in 2004, he stored it at Sasanokawa Shuzo, and he later advised the company on building Asaka. Asaka's stills were deliberately sized to match Chichibu's.

Yamazakura blends draw on more than Asaka. They include whisky from around the world along with matured Hanyu stock, and some bottles carry ages that run well past 2016. Sasanokawa Shuzo does not publish bottle by bottle whether its whiskies meet the Japanese whisky labelling standard.

Asaka is built in a converted warehouse of the sake brewery. Its two straight-necked pot stills, made by Miyake Seisakusho, hold 2,000 litres for the first distillation and 1,000 for the second, and at about three metres high are among the smallest in Japan. Fermentation runs 90 to 120 hours in five Douglas fir washbacks.

The Koriyama basin gets strong winds off Mount Bandai, and the angel's share runs at about 4 to 5 per cent a year. Asaka keeps two warehouses, one of them cooled so it never passes 25 degrees in summer. About 80 per cent of its casks are ex-bourbon.