Ichiro's Malt: The Whisky Finished in the Chichibu Valley

If you have taken the steam train up the Arakawa valley, you will have spent two and a half hours watching the same river narrow, the hills close in, and the towns get smaller. Somewhere along that line, in the town of Chichibu itself, there is a small distillery that has become one of the most talked-about names in whisky.

It is a strange thing to find at the end of a branch line. And it is, I think, the one souvenir from this valley that is genuinely worth the weight in your suitcase.

A Distillery That Began With a Closure

Ichiro Akuto grew up in a sake-brewing family in Saitama. The family also owned a whisky distillery at Hanyu, and around the year 2000 it closed — the Japanese whisky market at the time had very little room for a small producer.

He founded Venture Whisky in 2004, built a distillery on a hillside in Chichibu, and began distilling in February 2008. The bottles carry his given name: Ichiro’s Malt.

Since then, the same whisky that nobody wanted in 2000 has become the whisky that people queue for. Single casks from the distillery now go to auction. This is worth knowing before you go looking for a bottle, because it explains why the shelf in front of you may be emptier than you expected.

What “World Blended Whisky” Actually Means

Here is the part that is often left out, and I would rather say it plainly.

The bottle in this article is not a Chichibu single malt. It is the Malt & Grain “Classical Edition”, and the label describes it as a World Blended Whisky. The idea is a blend drawn from the world’s five great whisky-producing countries, brought to Chichibu and left there to marry and mature further before bottling.

So what Chichibu gives this bottle is not the spirit. It is the finishing — the years the blend spends in that valley, in a place where the winters are cold enough that a cliff face upstream freezes solid every January.

Two things are printed on the label, and both are meaningful:

• Non Chill-filtered — the whisky is not filtered cold to keep it clear, so more of the texture and aroma stays in the bottle
• Non Coloured — no caramel colouring has been added, so the colour you see is the colour the casks gave it

The Classical Edition is bottled at 48%, in 700 ml, and comes in a plain black presentation box. The blend is weighted towards malt, and there is a gentle smokiness in it rather than an aggressive peat.

Why This Bottle, and Not a Single Malt

If you want the distillery’s own single malt, please do go and look for it — but I would not build a trip around finding one. They are scarce, they are expensive, and a good many of them never reach an ordinary shop shelf at all.

The Malt & Grain range is the door into the house. It is made in enough quantity that you can actually buy it, it is priced like a good bottle rather than a collector’s item, and it carries the same blender’s hand. If you have never tasted anything from Chichibu, this is a far more sensible place to begin than an auction catalogue.

How to Have It Delivered to Your Tokyo Hotel

Amazon Japan and Rakuten can both deliver directly to the hotel where you are staying, which saves you carrying a heavy bottle around for the rest of your trip. Ordering a few days before your flight home works well — you can simply receive the package at the front desk.

• Please check with your hotel in advance that they will accept a package for you, and mention that it contains alcohol
• Set the shipping address to the hotel’s address, and add the hotel name and your guest name exactly as it appears on the reservation
• The legal drinking age in Japan is 20, and you will be asked to confirm your age when ordering alcohol
• On Amazon.co.jp, the English display toggle is at the top right of the screen. Rakuten is a Japanese-language site, so your browser’s translation feature is the easy way through

If you would rather buy it in person, the shops around Seibu-Chichibu Station are the obvious place to start, and the larger liquor shops and department store food halls in Tokyo usually carry the Malt & Grain range as well.

Two Rules for the Journey Home

It cannot be posted to you. Alcohol is not sent overseas from Amazon.jp or Rakuten. Whatever you buy, you carry.

It must go in your checked luggage. A 700 ml bottle is far beyond the 100 ml liquid limit for hand baggage, so it has to be packed in your hold suitcase — wrapped well, in the middle, away from the edges. The one exception is a bottle bought after airport security, in the departures duty-free shop.

And please check your own country’s duty-free allowance before you buy a second bottle. The allowance is usually generous enough for one, and rather less generous than people assume beyond that.

Where This Bottle Comes From

• The Paleo Express: A 1944 Locomotive Still Works This Valley — the steam train that runs the length of the valley, from Kumagaya to Mitsumineguchi
• Misotsuchi Icicles: Six Weeks When the Valley Freezes — how cold the upper valley gets, in the weeks when the river ice builds

Who Is This For?

Anyone who has been up that valley and would like to keep something from it. Anyone who enjoys whisky and has not yet met a Japanese one that was not either impossible to find or disappointing. And anyone who likes the idea that a bottle can be assembled from five countries and still end up tasting of one particular cold place in Saitama.

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