A guide to Japanese whisky

Postwar Japan drank a great deal of whisky. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s it was the default drink of the salaryman and the hostess bar, sales climbed every year, and the industry built for that. Suntory opened Hakushu in 1973. Nikka opened Miyagikyo in 1969. Everyone laid down stock on the assumption that demand would keep going.

It did not. Shochu took a large bite out of the market, a tax reform in 1989 removed the grading system that had propped up domestic whisky pricing, the economy stalled, and drinking habits moved on. Sales fell for close to two decades. Distilleries were mothballed and some closed outright. Karuizawa shut in 2000 and was eventually dismantled. Hanyu shut the same year. Very little new spirit went into cask through the 1990s, and that is the reason for a lot of what the shelves look like now.

In 2001 a Nikka Yoichi ten year old won a blind tasting run by a British whisky magazine, ahead of the Scotch it was up against. In 2003 Yamazaki 12 took a gold medal at the International Spirits Challenge. Awards kept coming, and in 2015 Jim Murray's Whisky Bible named a Yamazaki sherry cask release its world whisky of the year, which was reported everywhere.

The problem was arithmetic. A twelve year old whisky sold in 2015 was distilled in 2003, during the bust, when nobody was filling casks. Global demand arrived for stock that had never been laid down. Prices rose, then rose again, and in 2018 Suntory withdrew Hakushu 12 and Hibiki 17 altogether because it could not keep them going. Age statements came off labels across the category and bottles without them became the norm.

The other consequence was less obvious and worse. With real Japanese whisky scarce and expensive, a lot of things that were not Japanese whisky started being sold as though they were. That is what the labelling section below is about, and it is the most useful thing to understand before you spend money in this category.

While the big two were running out of stock, small distilleries started opening. Ichiro Akuto had already shown it was possible: he rescued the last casks from his family's closed Hanyu distillery, released them over a decade as the Card Series, and used that to build Chichibu, which began distilling in 2008. Since about 2016 a few dozen new distilleries have opened, many of them run by sake and shochu makers moving sideways into whisky with centuries of fermentation experience behind them.

Most of that spirit is still young. It is the most interesting part of the category right now and usually the best value in it.

In Scotland a blender can ring thirty distilleries and buy a cask from each. Japanese producers historically have not traded with each other, so a company that wanted a complex blend had to be able to produce every component itself. That constraint shaped the whole industry.

It is why Yamazaki runs pot stills of several different shapes and sizes side by side, ferments with different yeasts, and peats some of its barley and none of the rest. One distillery is made to behave like a dozen. Nikka does the same thing across two sites that were built as deliberate opposites: coal fired and heavy at Yoichi, steam heated and light at Miyagikyo.

Japan gets hotter summers and colder winters than Scotland, and the swing pushes spirit in and out of the wood harder. Whisky matures faster and the angel's share is larger, so a Japanese ten year old has often had more wood contact than a Scottish one of the same age. Distillery sites were chosen for water as much as anything: Yamazaki sits on water good enough that tea masters were using it centuries before there was a distillery there.

In a lot of whisky cultures the blend is the cheap product and the single malt is the serious one. Japan does not really see it that way. Blending is treated as the craft, the blender is the name on the door, and the flagship bottle of the biggest producer in the country is a blend. If you come to Japanese whisky assuming blends are the compromise option, you will skip past most of what is good about it.

Mizunara is Japanese oak, and it is the one thing in this category with no real equivalent anywhere else. Suntory began using it during the Second World War, not out of ambition but because imported casks had stopped arriving and the whisky had to go into something.

It is a difficult wood. The trees have to be old before there is enough usable timber, the grain is knotty and runs in ways that make it awkward to build a watertight cask from, and the wood is porous enough that the casks leak more than most. It also needs a long time to give anything back. A few years in mizunara does very little. Two decades in mizunara gives a whisky the sandalwood and incense character the wood is famous for, which is why properly mizunara matured whisky is rare and costs what it costs.

Read these labels carefully. Mizunara matured means the whisky spent its life in that wood. Mizunara finished means it spent a few months there at the end, which is a real technique that produces good whisky, but it is not the same thing and should not cost the same.

Japanese distilleries have casks available that nobody else does. Ex shochu casks at Kanosuke, plum wine and sake casks, and cherry wood, which is not oak at all and is used for finishing rather than full maturation. Some of this is genuine local character and some of it is a young distillery looking for a way to make three year old spirit taste like something. Both are worth trying at the right price.

Malted barley only, pot distilled, all of it from one distillery. Yamazaki, Hakushu, Yoichi, Miyagikyo, Chichibu, Akkeshi. Single does not mean one cask, it means one distillery, and almost every single malt on a shelf is a marriage of many casks.

Malt whisky from more than one distillery, with no grain whisky in it. Sometimes still labelled pure malt on older Japanese bottles. Nikka's Taketsuru range is the best known example.

Made from grains other than malted barley, usually corn, and distilled in continuous column stills rather than pot stills. It is lighter and sweeter, and most of it exists to go into blends, but Japan bottles some on its own. Nikka runs a pair of Coffey stills shipped over from Scotland in the 1960s, and Kirin's Fuji grain whisky has a following of its own.

Malt and grain together. The largest category by volume and, in Japan, not the lesser one. Hibiki is a blend. Toki is a blend. Most of what people actually drink in Japan is a blend, usually in a highball.

The category Japan added. Malt and grain blended together, but all of it distilled at the same distillery. It takes a site that makes both, which is why Kirin's Fuji is the bottle that usually carries the term.

A blend that includes whisky made outside Japan. This is a legitimate style with some very good bottles in it, and the honest ones say so on the label. It is also the loophole the next section is about.

The Japan Spirits and Liqueurs Makers Association introduced a labelling standard that took effect in April 2021, with a grace period that ran to the end of March 2024. To call something Japanese whisky under it:

• Malted grain has to be used, and the water has to come from Japan.
• Saccharification, fermentation and distillation all have to happen at a distillery in Japan.
• It has to be matured in Japan, in wooden casks of 700 litres or less, for at least three years.
• It has to be bottled in Japan at 40 percent alcohol or more.

The catch is that the standard is voluntary and binds only the association's members. A producer who is not a member can still put the words on the bottle. It has cleaned a great deal up, and several well known bottles quietly changed their labels rather than their recipes when it came in, but it is not law.

Japanese whisky on a bottle from a member producer now means what you want it to mean. Product of Japan, World Whisky, World Blend, or simply the absence of the phrase, usually means imported whisky is involved. None of that makes it bad. Nikka From The Barrel is a world blend, bottled at 51 percent, and it is one of the best value bottles in any whisky category. It just means you should not pay a Japanese single malt price for it.

On this site we record what we have been able to verify about each bottle against that standard, and we say when we have not been able to verify it rather than guessing. You will find that on each whisky's page.

Buy a blend first. It is what the category is actually built on, it is the cheapest way to find out whether you like a producer's house style, and it makes a good highball while you decide.

Every bottle an Australian retailer is currently selling for less than $100, in stock, is collected on one page: Japanese whisky under $100.

Hakushu and Miyagikyo are the two easiest to like, and between them they show the split between the light, green house style and the richer one. Akashi is usually the cheapest way to try a Japanese single malt at all.

Nikka From The Barrel has been the answer to this question for years. Coffey Grain is the other one: grain whisky is unfashionable, which keeps it affordable.

The new distilleries are where the interest is. Chichibu releases are small and go quickly, Akkeshi is doing the most distinctive peated whisky in Japan, and both are worth more of your attention than another bottle from the big two at a collector's price.