Chichibu Distillery: The Future of Japanese Craft Whisky

Very much the pioneer of the new wave of Japanese distilling, Ichiro Akuto has taken both his and his family's experience of the Japanese drinks industry and built on it, at first with a small distillery creating whiskies that appealed to drinkers all around the world; and then by helping to grow the fearsome global reputation of Japanese whisky.

The history of Chichibu

Chichibu distillery started production in 2008, but its story begins centuries earlier, in 1625. That's when Toa Shuzo, the Akuto family’s sake brewery, was founded in the city of Chichibu. In 1941, the brewery moved operations about 60 miles west to the city of Hanyu and five years later Isoji Akuto – Ichiro’s grandfather – established a distillery there. The Hanyu distillery produced grain whisky for Toa Shuzo’s Golden Horse blends – in which they were combined with Scotch whisky – but started making malt in 1983. However, the Japanese market was flagging at that time and the stills were turned off again in 1989.

It’s shortly after this that Ichiro Akuto enters the scene. Having studied at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, he went to work for market leader Suntory as a brand manager. He returned to the family company in 1999, and quickly found himself working across the whole business.

With his experience in the whisky world, he spied a space for Japanese single malt whisky and launched Hanyu’s first single malt in 2000 – the now confusingly titled Golden Horse Chichibu 8 Year Old, named after the family’s hometown. Along with this release, Hanyu fired up its stills to make single malt again, but the whisky market was down, and the 2000 season was the end of Hanyu’s whisky production. Toa Shuzo was sold in 2004, and the new owners closed down the whisky business to focus on sake and shochu.

Ichiro left the company after the sale, but managed to acquire most of the remaining Hanyu casks. He set up a new company, Venture Whisky, to not only sell the old stock, but also build a new distillery: Chichibu.

The new distillery took years to fund and build, time that Ichiro spent visiting bars and shops across Japan, introducing them to his small-batch Hanyu releases and making contacts that he has maintained to the present. Construction started on the Chichibu distillery in 2007, and it was finally ready and licensed in 2008 – the first spirit ran from the the stills in February that year.

Recent history has seen even more changes, with Chichibu II, a larger sister distillery, opening nearby in 2019 and a new grain distillery at Tomakomai on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido opening in 2025.

Becoming a cult classic

The years since Chichibu’s first spirit was laid down have seen it ascend from obscurity to become an international icon of Japanese whisky. The key to this rise has been Ichiro Akuto himself and, when he was able to hire them, his team, who have slowly built an international following, one bottling at a time.

In the early days, Ichiro was well known in the bars of Japan, sharing his Hanyu stocks through a series of respected releases that were sought out by bartenders. As the Hanyu releases gained a formidable reputation, he followed them with youthful Chichibu ‘New Born’ spirit releases, the first only months after starting to distil. This brought the name of Chichibu to the world, building anticipation for the day when his own whisky was ready to launch.

Chichibu The First launched in 2011 at three years old, and the distillery hasn’t ever had a consistently available range since. Instead, a number of limited-edition bottlings have appeared over the years, each a small batch of about 4,000-12,000 bottles. As Chichibu’s popularity grew around the world, these bottlings became increasingly hard to get hold of, split among more markets and fans. Combine that with a large number of single cask and very small batch bottlings created for bars, shops and whisky clubs, and you have a huge range of whiskies, perfect for collectors and drinkers looking for a wide range of releases to try.

The Covid-19 pandemic occurred at just the wrong time for Chichibu, as the new Chichibu II distillery opened and plans for an ongoing release were being finalised. Instead, it was put on hold and rumours continue to grow about a new and more easily available Chichibu coming in the future.

Chichibu’s whisky

Ichiro Akuto has an idiosyncratic approach to making whisky, and rather than focusing on a specific individual style, he has chosen instead to – in a very traditionally Japanese distilling fashion – make a range of whiskies.

The first variable is malted barley. While Japan doesn’t grow very much of the grain itself, Ichiro has been able to source enough local grain to make it a noticeable part of production. His team malts barley at the distillery and bolsters it with malt imported from overseas, especially the UK. As part of that, he also imports peated barley, adding the potential for smoky whiskies to Chichibu’s repertoire.

Fermentation is fairly constant across the various types of barley, but has changed over the years. Initially, Chichibu started out with a fairly standard 2.5-3.5 day fermentation, but increased this to more than 100 hours in 2015. With Chichibu II in place in late 2019, the extra capacity meant that they could push things further at the original distillery, and now run even longer fermentations to give a greater range of fruity flavours and allow more variation.

The next place were Ichiro can choose the style of his spirit is maturation – he is very much a king of wood, with a cooperage on-site to service the wide range of casks that go into the distillery’s warehouse. While about half of Chichibu’s spirit is filled into ex-bourbon casks, the rest goes into a wide range of casks sourced by Ichiro and his team. This includes everything from the more common sherry and wine casks seen around the world, to locally made IPA and stout beer casks and, most famously, mizunara.

Mizunara is a species of Japanese oak, famed for giving a uniquely ‘Japanese’ twist to whiskies, with layers of incense and spice. It is a difficult wood to work with, hard to shape into casks and leaky once filled. To top that off, there is only a very small amount of it available, auctioned off each year to an audience far from restricted to whisky makers – it is also used extensively in high-end furniture. Ichiro has been attending the mizunara auctions since 2010, and has become well known for his love of the wood – he has whisky marrying vats of mizunara and his washbacks are even made from it.

While many Chichibu releases are focused around a single style of whisky, blending is very much at the heart of Ichiro’s approach to whisky making. His more regular releases are often the combination of a wide range of cask types, bringing together peated and unpeated spirit to create complex whiskies that express the overarching philosophy of the distillery.

Key Chichibu releases

While there are – as of the time of writing – no ongoing Chichibu releases, certain expressions have reappeared from year to year, each a variation on the previous edition.

On The Way

This is a regularly occurring bottling that has shown the current state of Chichibu’s progress to having an ongoing release. Each is a unique combination of casks from throughout the extensive Chichibu warehouses, giving a range of ages and styles to play with to create an ongoing expression. The 2019 edition was revealed to be ‘On The Way…to a ten-year-old’ heralding the 2020 release of The First Ten.

The Floor Malted

Since 2007, Ichiro and his team have been visiting Crisp's Great Ryburgh maltings in Norfolk to not only check on the malt that they are bringing in to Japan, but also, since 2008, to learn more about how to process their own barley. This has resulted in The Floor Malted, an expression using barley malted by the Chichibu team themselves during these visits using Warminster’s traditional floor maltings.

The Peated

While Japan does have peat bogs, with the largest area being on the northern island of Hokkaido, whisky using local peat is still quite rare. Chichibu imports its peated malt from the UK and uses the resulting whisky in many of its releases, but focuses on it for the regularly appearing The Peated edition.

London/Paris Edition

In the UK, The Whisky Exchange has been a champion for Chichibu’s whiskies since they were first launch, joined by Paris’s La Maison du Whisky in France. We each run a large whisky show each Autumn, and the London and Paris editions were initially bottled to celebrate these shows. They are now less tied to the events, instead honouring the two great cities, and bring together interesting cask combinations to give Chichibu fans something different ever year.

The Whisky Exchange’s Trilogies

Every year, The Whisky Exchange releases a number of Chichibu releases, and more recently these have consisted of a number of trilogies: triptychs of themed labels with single casks and small batches of whisky. Themes have varied from tattoos, to kaiju (giant monsters) and martial arts.

Single Casks

While Ichiro Akuto is very much a master of blending, many of the most sought-after Chichibu releases have been single casks, each showing off a specific style of spirit. Along with peated and unpeated spirit, there have been releases using casks that once held peated whisky (Scotch and Chichibu’s own), as well as range of other wines and spirits. Ichiro is especially fond of casks used to ferment and mature IPA beers, with the fruitiness of the beer style working very well with Chichibu’s own fruity character.