Tasting Whiskey

by Lew Bryson

  Copper gleams everywhere at Suntory’s Yamazaki distillery.

  Aging in wood simply runs riot in these distilleries. There are the familiar varieties — sherry barrels made of American or European oak, along with bourbon barrels — in first-fill and refill condition. But also, as Miyamoto noted, Suntory makes its own oversize casks, at its own cooperage. “Puncheons,” he called them. “We import the timber from the U.S., and bend it to make our own barrels. [They’re] 480-liter casks, compared to 180 or 230 for the bourbon barrel or hogshead [the size common in Scotland].”

  It doesn’t end there. “We also make mizunara casks, made from Japanese oak,” he said. “The timber is slow growing and requires a long maturation. When we had the war, it was sad, and tragic. The importation stopped, so we had no bourbon barrels or sherry butts. We had to source our own supply. We used the mizunara timber. Bourbon and sherry casks give flavor after 5 years. Mizunara didn’t, so we thought, ‘That’s bad wood,’ and left the casks in a corner. Twenty years later we tried it. ‘Wow, amazing taste!’ We don’t char it, just toast. We specify the color of the fox (light toasting) or the raccoon (deep toasting).”

  He told me about one more type of cask that they use to make whisky that goes in their delicious Hibiki blend, along with about 20 others. “It is finished in plum liqueur casks,” he said. “They’re old casks that would be taken away from the system, but we give them a treatment with infrared rays and then put plum liqueur in the casks. It picks up a very nice oakiness and sells very well. Then we finish whisky in that cask.”

  Hibiki is a top-end blend, delicately complex and floral, and a beautiful presentation in a heavy bottle. “There are 24 facets on the bottle, represents 24 seasons in Japan, and 24 hours in a day,” said Miyamoto, who then noted, “We care about the small details. Sometimes too much!”

  Whisky is very much a part of metropolitan Japan.

  Highballing It

  Blends are the lion’s share of the Japanese whisky business, just as with Scotch whisky, and always have been. They were hugely successful in the boom years of the Japanese economy, consumed as mizuwari, “mixed with water.” Reminiscent of the “Kentucky tea” that bourbon drinkers will make on a hot day, a mizuwari is perhaps one measure of blended whisky, ice, and two (or two and a half) measures of water.

  Whisky sales, driven by the ease and refreshment of mizuwari, were immense in the 1970s and 1980s. Dave Broom notes in The World Atlas of Whisky that in the 1980s, sales of the Suntory Old brand alone hit 12.4 million cases, almost as much as the global sales of the entire Johnnie Walker brand line today. That’s simply immense.

  Canned highballs — whisky and sparkling water, canned like a soda — are a uniquely Japanese invention. Both Suntory and Nikka produce them.

  It didn’t last. When the economy crashed, whisky crashed with it, and the Japanese turned to a cheap, low-malt type of beer known as happoshu. What brought whisky back was an old twist on the once popular mizuwari: soda water, the highball, or as it’s sometimes called, “soda-wari.” It’s growing quickly, and Suntory is packaging a canned premixed version.

  “When we enjoy whisky in Japan, we add water, or soda, the highball style,” Miyamoto said. “Canned highball, that is very, very good, and handy on a train! We have the bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka, it takes two and a half hours. Most businessmen [going on the train] will buy a can or two of highball and have that instead of beer.” Japanese brewers are feeling the pinch; beer sales are dropping rapidly.

  Still, drinking whisky in Japan has changed, and not just switching water for soda. Previously there was a hierarchy, an almost rigid progression of the whiskies you drank as you progressed in your career, starting with a basic blend. Now young Japanese men or women may have a Suntory Highball (basic) or a glass of Yamazaki single malt (high-brow). The hierarchy has faded. If they can afford it, they will try it.

  Suntory’s Scottish roots are evident here.

  Even single malts have changed with the Japanese bent for innovation, though. Where a Scottish distillery may bottle several expressions of its malt, mainly differentiated by the age of the whisky, the Japanese take those different whiskies they’ve been making and create single malts that can vary much more among bottlings.

  “We introduced the blending concept of single malts,” Miyamoto said. “All the different whiskies that go into Yamazaki are made at Yamazaki, so it is still a single malt. It makes a very balanced single malt. That makes the Suntory whisky different from the other [single malts]. Different from Nikka, also.”

  Sample some of the whiskies, and you can taste the differences:

  The Hakushu 12-year-old: fresh, green, and possessed of a nectar-light sweetness; the mouth is grassy-sweet with a lime-pith edge around it and just a touch of soft smoke in the finish.

  The Yamazaki 18-year-old: full, rich, with ripe harvest fruit notes in the nose; the same in the mouth with a solid weight of wood that lasts into the finish, a whisky with gravity.

  The blended Hibiki 12-year-old: softly floral, fruit pastilles — I can smell that slightly dusty note — and lemon sand tarts; the palate is more settled, with touches of light pit fruits and a juicy sweetness that tapers to a dryly spicy finish; elegant blend.

  Is Japanese whisky more or less the same as Scotch whisky, or is it very different? There are similar elements, to be sure, and I’m not at all certain that I could pick a lone Japanese malt out of a lineup of 10 single malts. But mizunara oak, the uninhibited experimentation with process that comes from necessity, and the fascinating sensibilities of Japanese blended whiskies make for an excellent addition to the world of whisky.

  “The Japanese climate makes the Japanese style,” Mike Miyamoto says. Given the wide range of climate from the subtropical southern islands to the snowy winters of Hokkaido, I think he may have put his finger on it.

  The Mash Tun whisky bar in Tokyo dislays a decidedly Scottish flair — and an impressive range of whiskies from around the world.

  Craft Whiskey

  One aspect of whiskey making that’s getting a lot of attention these days is the new wave of distillers setting up shop all over the world. No one is quite set on what to call them yet: artisanal distillers, microdistillers, craft distillers. I’m calling them “craft distillers” now, because I can see that coming, after 30 years of watching the craft beer business. “Artisanal” is too long, and a bit pretentious; “micro” becomes a problem when you get successful. “Craft” is likely where it’s going to wind up.

  But for now they’re small distillers, although small distillers are nothing new or even particularly different. After all, that’s how things started, over 600 years ago, and how things were till the Industrial Revolution. There have always been a few small distillers around. Some folks are just hardheaded enough that they want to do things their own way.

  I visited a small distiller back in the 1980s, before we got all excited about them. That was Michter’s, up in the Pennsylvania hills outside Schaefferstown. There had been distilling going on at the spot since the mid-1700s, and you could see why. The surrounding area was rich farmland, but the ridges around the spot would make travel hard. The distillery sat in a fold of hills, protected from wind and blessed with a clean-flowing creek of limestone water.

  Michter’s is proof that small distilleries can do great things. That’s where one of the best bourbons I’ve ever tasted was made: A. H. Hirsch 16-year-old, a legendary bottling of well-aged whiskey that is still talked about reverently for its deep, complex aromas and rich but not over-oaked mouth. Knowing that a great American whiskey came from a small distillery in eastern Pennsylvania makes it easier for me to believe something like that can happen again.

  Balcones: a fiercely independent — and idiosyncratic — Texas distillery

  I am going to speak almost entirely about American craft distillers, because I know more about them, have visited some of them, and have sampled more of their whiskeys. I have also tasted some very good whi
skey from craft distillers like Penderyn (Wales), Armorik (France), Mackmyra (Sweden), Zuidam (Holland), and Limeburners and Lark (Australia). I’ve also very much enjoyed the whiskeys of Kavalan (Taiwan) and Amrut (India), but they are definitely not small craft distillers; they are large and rapidly growing. The craft movement itself is also a growing one that is going to change the face of whiskey making; in fact, to some extent it already has.

  A Small Start

  Modern craft whiskey got its start in America in 1993. That’s when two guys started making whiskey on small stills in idiosyncratic ways; coincidentally, both were on the West Coast. Steve McCarthy of Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Oregon, was probably a couple of months ahead of Fritz Maytag’s Anchor Distilling in San Francisco, but they were almost synchronous.

  The year 1993 was a time full of expectations for a small but growing number of drinks fans. Over the preceding few years we’d seen small breweries pop up and start making beer that was completely different from what the big national breweries made; Fritz Maytag’s Anchor Brewing was one of them, in fact. By 1993 around 450 small breweries were in operation in America, more than at any time since World War II. More amazing yet, that number would double in the next 5 years.

  Across the country I and other craft brew fans — mostly young, professional, mobile — saw this happening and thought it presaged a whole new era of small, cool, interesting producers. When we saw Fritz Maytag, who was revered as one of the fathers of craft brewing, starting a microdistillery, we were sure that craft distilling would be the next big thing.

  It wasn’t. The output was tiny (I think the first bottling of Anchor’s Old Potrero totaled about 1,400 bottles, and most was sold to restaurants) and expensive, and not at all what people were used to.

  But it was full of promise. I got a sip of that first bottling, and I still recall the way everyone in the small room went silent as we passed around the glass and just smelled it (it was around 120 proof, so we weren’t in a rush to taste it). It was only about a year old, and made with rye malt, and it was stunningly aromatic: zesty-fresh grass, rolling waves of mint, and just a bare wreathing of wood. It was young, powerful, and invigorating. It was very different from what we usually saw from American distillers, and rye whiskey was still under the radar at that point.

  Steve McCarthy’s malt whisky was also different. He’d been inspired by a visit to Scotland, where he discovered the Lagavulin 16-year-old and wanted to make something similar at the eau-de-vie distillery he’d opened in 1985. “I wondered if we could make whisky on an eau-de-vie still, and we could!” he told me recently, still excited about that moment from 20 years ago. “We brought in peated malt from Scotland. And now we’re using all Oregon oak. I don’t think it’s any good at all for wine, but it’s fantastic for whiskey. This is Oregon single malt, and I’ve stayed with that.”

  Like I said, craft whiskey looked ready to follow immediately on the heels of craft brewing. We were terribly disappointed when it didn’t explode into popularity as microbrewing had. But we’d seen and tasted the future, even though we didn’t realize it at the time. The whiskeys Anchor and Clear Creek made would point the way for American craft distillers: different, small, the product of individual passion.

  Craft Distilleries in Production

  Craft distilling has seen explosive growth in recent years, more than quadrupling from 2008 to 2012.

  Look around today, and you’ll see a whiskey landscape that looks a lot like the craft brewing landscape of 1993. There are the established big distillers (American and imported), a few established small distillers who’ve been around for over 15 years, and a burgeoning broth of tiny upstarts — over 300 of them. The media loves them (they’re great stories!), they have enthusiastic local support (and local opposition to the devil’s juice in some areas), and they have a lot of innovative ideas and are resurrecting old, forgotten ones.

  An important difference in the comparison to craft brewers is that the craft whiskey makers actually have it easier in one very important respect. The people they’re selling to — wholesalers, retail stores, and bars and restaurants — have already seen this work with craft brewers, and work well.

  Craft brewers were still a long shot in 1993. People didn’t know what they were, or why they were around. Wholesalers and retailers had no idea how to sell them, and most bars had six taps or less. All they could see was that more beers would cost them more money — and who was going to buy them?

  The answers to those questions seem obvious 20 years later. Thanks to the success of craft beer, for the wholesalers and retailers of whiskey that’s exactly what it is: obvious. They’re much more willing to take a chance on a new, unknown product if the packaging and marketing are good and the whiskey in the bottle delivers. That’s been an immense help to craft whiskey makers.

  Where craft distillers have it harder than craft brewers is in selling their wares to the consumer. Craft brewers had it easy there: the beers being made by the major American brewers were all the same, and they were all bland, light lagers. Big was bad.

  That’s definitely not true with whiskey. Bourbon and Scotch and Irish are anything but bland. (I’d argue that what most Americans expected when they asked for Canadian whisky 20 years ago was bland, but that was influenced by a marketing decision on what was exported; there’s great Canadian to be had!) But the craft brewing story is so temptingly parallel to the craft distilling story in so many other ways that it may seem irresistible to disparage “the bland whiskey of the big distillers.” That’s a mistake, as anyone who’s had a dram of Lagavulin or a snort of Booker’s can tell you.

  The story of craft whiskey — the details that pull in aficionados and newcomers alike — has to be about something else. And here’s where craft distillers are making headway.

  Whose Whiskey Is It, Really?

  Craft whiskey makers are at a distinct disadvantage compared to other craft distillers and brewers: Whiskey takes a lot longer to be ready for sale. Unless distillers want to get into the white whiskey game (see The Moonshine Mystique), they’d better have a solid capital reserve so they can keep making whiskey till the first barrels are ready to bottle and sell. Even the quickest small-barrel stuff usually takes 6 months.

  Craft brewers had their own problems with capital. It takes a lot of stainless steel to brew the large volumes of beer they need to succeed: kettles, tanks, pipes, whirlpools, more tanks, and hundreds of kegs, some of which never find their way back to the brewery. Then there’s the bottling line, glass, and labels and packaging.

  Some brewers found a way around those capital requirements through a practice called contract brewing. They would pay established brewers that had extra capacity — usually the old regionals, such as Genesee, F. X. Matt, or August Schell — to brew beer for them and then spend the money they saved on not building a brewery for marketing and promotion. The beer might be the brewery’s regular line relabeled, it might be brewed to different specifications, or it might actually be brewed by the contractor, who would lease the facilities for a day or so every month. It caused bad feelings in the industry for a long time; brick-and-mortar brewers felt that contract brewers were cheating, that they didn’t have enough skin in the game.

  In craft whiskey a similar procedure is to find distillers or brokers with an excess stock of aged whiskey and buy it to sell under your own label. Whisky Advocate calls that “sourced whiskey,” while whiskey blogger Chuck Cowdery calls such operations “Potemkin distilleries” and craft distillers call them things I won’t repeat (the gentlest is “fakers”).

  It’s not just craft distillers, either: Bulleit, a large brand owned by Diageo, currently has no distillery. Bulleit buys bourbon from Four Roses and rye from the former Seagram distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, which is now operated by MGP Ingredients.

  As in brewing, there are varying degrees of how much the sellers add to the process. They may just show up, pick out a taste profile, and leave it to the warehouse manager
to pull a parcel of barrels and bottle them. They may go warehouse crawling and pick their own. They may do what folks like David Perkins at High West distillery did, not just picking out their own but blending them in their own interesting ways: a young rye and a much older one, a bourbon and a rye, and a blend Perkins calls Campfire, with bourbon, rye, and a smoky Scotch. Or they may buy some good older whiskey and either blend it with their own younger whiskey or “finish” the whiskey in barrels that once held other spirits or wine.

  Is bottling other people’s whiskey bad practice? I’d say it comes down to intent: whether the bottler’s intent is to deceive the consumer into believing that the whiskey in the bottle is its own. Perkins, for instance, has always been ready to let you know that he’s bottling sourced whiskey. Other distillers say not a word about where their aged whiskey comes from, and unless you read their label very closely, you won’t know it’s not their own. Look to see if it only says where it was “bottled.” See if the town name is different from the distillery’s. And do a quick check on age; if it’s a 4-year-old whiskey and the distillery just opened, it’s sourced! Remember, you can’t really guess the age by color in these days of small barrels.

  If a craft distiller is selling whiskey that isn’t its own make under a label that doesn’t identify it as such (or at least have information on their website or Facebook page that shows it), exactly where does the “craft” come in? They may well be making whiskey and aging it with all kinds of good intentions, but there are other ways to make money while they’re waiting; gin or vodka, for instance, both grain spirits, or unaged whiskey, which can be done a lot better than many are doing it now. If they’re buying whiskey, and reselling it under their own label without telling you or making the information easy to find, I’d buy another whiskey.