A Full Year of Distillation

Hey, I’m Casey. Thanks for reading our newsletter, sharing the startup journey of Kamui Whisky K.K. We’ve been busy, but when we aren’t overwhelmed, we’ll share a story as we craft up a whisky distillery on a remote, volcanic island in the most northern part of Japan.

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The team has come back together. After a few months off, with the distillery closed for the winter, we’ve come back from different parts of Japan, and the world. In Rishiri, ready to go.

2023 will be our first full year of distilling.

Last year was a determined rush to get everything set up, get our license, begin distilling, and deliver our first 神居原酒 to the Tokyo Whisky Fes.

The Difference in A Month

This is what Rishiri looks like in winter:

Ice covers the water’s surface in Wakkanai port. Taking a very bumpy ferry ride to Rishiri.

Without a 4x4, or putting little kids to work, there was no way to drive into the distillery’s parking area.

On the theme of putting little kids to work, had the 4 and 5 year old help with labeling some special bottles. Whisky making will be in their blood.

Winter in Kamui is incredibly beautiful when the weather is nice.

The light can be breathtaking. The snow piles up on the south side of the distillery building.

The snow reaches a couple meters high, touching the lower part of our big bay window. Snow height was a good meter lower than last year.

It’s peaceful the night of this picture. But the temperature was -11℃. The preceeding night the wind was came in sideways. I was trying to open the warehouse, but the lock was stuck. It was sooo cold. My hands were freezing trying to jiggle that lock free. It must have been -30℃ with the windchill.

The pictures above were all from mid- February.

A month later, in mid-March, this is how Kamui Whisky K.K. looks:

No problem driving up to the distillery.

Even nice enough to work outside, in the sun of course, shadows are cold. The beauty that is mobile Wifi.

Our forever emotionally moving sunsets. (This was before I cleaned the windows.)

Restarting the Distillery

We had drained all the water from the pipes (because they would burst in the winter freeze), turned off and disassembled the boiler.

As always we had a moment of drama. We were told it would take weeks to get the boiler re-started and ready to work. Not the days we had expected. Weeks would knock of valuable, valuable time from our distilling schedule.

Luckily, Shiraita-san, Kamui’s magician worked his magic:

Shiraita-san finding solutions where others only find problems.

Look at this quick step:

Our Head Distiller, Javier, looking after, and into, all the details.

Giving our stills a polish.

Checking on our first ever barrel of Whisky.

It is starting to smell really, really good in the warehouse. The smell of the whisky aging is sublime.

We had another worry. The whisky smells great, but we were worried about the Angel’s Share. It seemed the Angels were taking a lot over the winter. To check we opened up our first cask to check. It was less than it sounded, but we have a lot to learn about how much share the angels of Rishiri take.

Our Distilling Targets for 2023

This, our first full-year of distilling, we are targeting to produce:

8640L

which is: 36 barrels + 1200L of 神居原酒

Of course, every batch, every barrel will be made with love and care. We are crafting all of our whisky with the deep love of Rishiri. Rishiri in a bottle.

It’s not a lot of whisky though. We’ll be one of the smallest, craft-est distilleries in Japan. Already we are experiencing overwhelming demand, way above the small amount we can produce. We need to make more whisky here at Kamui.

If the team achieves the distillation targets we’ll be heading from our island, on a company trip to another island, Hawaii.

Here’s to hoping we achieve our target. We’re confident we’ll make extremely good whisky. Now we have to dramatically increase production so that more and more people will be able to experience the special spirit that is Rishiri Whisky.