Hey, I’m Casey. Welcome to our weekly newsletter sharing the startup journey of Kamui Whisky K.K. Each week the team or I will share a story as we set up a craft whisky distillery on a remote, volcanic island in the most northern part of Japan.
We’re lucky, we have a member of Japanese Whisky royalty as one of our advisors. Struggling with this license issue, I’d asked him if he knew anyone who could give us some tips. He recommended we meet Taiko Nakamura, founder of Shizuoka Distillery.
We found out, much later, that Taiko and his wife, Mika, decline almost all requests from new craft distillers. There’s too many, and most are just in it for the money. But they’d agreed to meet us, and give us some their time, because we’d been intro’d by a grandee of Japanese whisky. Royalty certainly opens doors.
We set the meeting at 11am this past Thursday. The plan was to drop off the kids at daycare, and drive from Tokyo to the distillery in Shizuoka, usually a 2 hr 15min - 3 hour drive. Quickly things didn’t go to plan.
We got trapped in 1.5 hours of traffic on the highway out of Tokyo. The Tomei highway usually gets backed up, but I’d figured early on a Thursday morning it wouldn’t be so bad. Wrong.
I started stressing in the car about how late we would be. I hate being late, it seriously stresses me out. I kept rechecking our expected arrival time on the navigation system, it held steady at arriving 90 minutes late. The minutes went by very slowly.
After 4 hours in the car, no breakfast for my wife, no lunch for either of us, we pulled up to the distillery, well late.
It’s tradition in Japan to give a small gift when you meet someone new, especially if they are doing you a favor. That morning I’d bought two dozen fresh Krispy Kremes, and handed them to Taiko and his wife as soon as we met, apologizing profusely. I don’t think they’d received that many donuts as a nice-to-meet-you gift before, especially not out here in rural Shizuoka. It brokered a hint of a smile. Donut diplomacy.
For the next 3 and a half hours Taiko and his wife Mika answered every question we posed to them. They were very transparent, the height of graciousness.
It was a master class in whisky making and how to set up a new distillery in Japan, things you can’t read in books or on the internet. Our whole crew, Azuma-san, our architect, Kisa-san, our Sales & Marketing lead, my wife, and I all learned a ton.
About the License
We got a bunch of tips on how to approach the distillation licensing process. Taiko and Mika had been through it a few years before and everything was fresh. I learned that we don’t actually get the official distilling license when we pass the screening from the tax office, we get a “karimenkyo”. Like a driving permit. Only after we actually cross the 6000L distilling threshold, the minimum amount required to produce to receive a license, do we get the official license. The day we can take off those training wheels and feel like big boy, official whisky distillers, got a bit further away.
Waste Water
No one in Japanese whisky talks about what to do with the waste water created through production. This has been a headache for Azuma-san. He’s been agonizing over it. How much is produced? What compounds are in it? He’s been trying to find out, but there’s not much information out there, and the environmental rules that apply to us in Hokkaido are pretty vague.
We talked with Taiko for over an hour about waste water. It is his biggest bottleneck. They’ve agonized over it as well. He and Mika kindly shared all the approaches they’d taken, the false starts, the solutions they’d hacked. Other than them no one had that knowledge to share; people in bigger whisky companies in Japan are silo’d and nearly no-one knows about the whole process from designing and setting up the facility to actual distillation. As a startup learning from someone a few steps ahead is always the best way. We were lucky to have such an open senpai.
First release
Their first release of 5000 bottles sold out in less than a week. Priced at 8500 yen a bottle.
That gave me hope for our business plan. With a whisky distillery you don’t make money for quite a while. The years it takes the new make to age bring in no revenue, unless you make gin or other spirits, which a lot of international craft distillers do, but Taiko nor we have that plan, so it’s going to be a few years of nearly zero income until we have something to release.
Taiko and Mika were super kind to share with us their thoughts on how much of the yearly batch to release after 3 years, at 6 to 7 years, the prime years, and later. It’d been something I’ve been pondering over for a while. It seems there is no correct answer, it’s a balance between making some revenue, and possibly surviving, and aging until the right time for your terroir.
Corks vs. Screw caps
We go to taste their new make. Our team was gushing over the quality. They use 2 different stills that create different flavors, with each of those refined in a 3rd still through the second distillation. Hearing about yet another component to the flavor equation was super interesting.
But corks. I asked about the price of their release, 8500 yen, in contrast with the cheaper image of having a screw cap. Years ago, the wine industry had struggled between the traditionalists using corks, and newer producers switching to screw caps to ensure that wined didn’t get ruined. A lot of the debate was around image and the impression of lower quality that screw caps convey.
Taiko and Mika use screw caps. Taiko is strong in his belief that screw caps are the wiser path. They’d been importers of whisky for years before becoming distillers themselves, and they’d experienced that about 8% of corks went bad. Whether it was that the corks became loose, got bacteria, or whatnot. As a true craftsman, that deeply, deeply cares about his product, and how a customer experiences it, Taiko rhetorically asked why you would give a customer a high end product that had an 8% chance of going bad? I kept on, asking about the image of lower quality versus a high price point, asking him if there were other Japanese whiskies above 4500yen that had screw caps. He looked at me like I needed to do more studying, “All of them.”
Still Envy
We have what will surely be beautiful stills on order with Vendome. Taiko was impressed with our choice of Vendome, and hearing that our level of respect in his eyes visibly went up. After talking for 3 hours Mika kindly gave us a tour.
Shizuoka distillery has 4 stills. Actually it is 6. We will have 2 small ones. They’ve got this huge wood-burning behemoth. They’ve got an old Karuizawa distillery still in operation. They’ve also got a spirit still that lays dormant; there is a plan to make other spirits in the future, but they won’t mix the whisky still mixed with some other spirits. The luxury of having a dormant still was enviable.
Then as we entered the first warehouse, we saw 2 more unused stills. They’d also picked these up at auction from the closed Karuizawa distillery. They are used for parts to keep the one Karuizawa still in operation. So, 6 stills in total: 3 in use, 1 dormant, 2 for parts.
Some day. Some day, we’ll get to that level.
Fermentation Vats
I never imagined fermentation vats could be so beautiful. On many of the tours I’ve been on the vats are proletarian affairs - aluminum, or in many cases just plastic. Shizuoka has beautifully crafted wooden fermenters made by an Osaka company that has been crafting for sake producers for years. They had Oregon pine fermenters and Japanese pine fermenters. The little notches in the wood that slotted each plank of wood together, with hoops of beautiful metal cabling, signaled skilled craftsmanship.
Mika kindly let me know the price. Surprisingly reasonable. Maybe even affordable for us at the beginning, but we won’t have the space. A dream that I’ll have to tuck away for a few yeas, but certainly an achievable one.
Awards for Shizuoka Distillery
Taiko is just getting started.
He has a deep love, and a deep, uniquely Japanese craftsmanship to his distilling. Every aspect of the distillery was made with consideration. Shizuoka Distillery has had only one release, but I believe they won’t be far away from winning awards. Over time I’m sure they will collect lots and lots of them. Taiko’s vision is to make a world-class Japanese whisky, competing with the best, refining, year-by-year. I’m guessing that some day Shizuoka will have million dollar bottles just like we’ve seen from Ichiro at Chichibu Distillery.
Buy their next releases quick. You might less than a week to get an order in.
Warehouse #2
We finished our time at Shizuoka in Warehouse #2. There are thousands of barrels aging there. But it was the smell. The smell of aging whisky. It felt tangible, like walking through a smell with a physical presence. It was sublime. They say smell holds memories the longest, bringing a sense of time and place to memories. That rich smell of whisky in Shizuoka’s Warehouse #2 is a memory that will not leave me any time soon.
To think we’ll have our own warehouse with that luxurious, rich whisky aroma. To imagine we could read a book surrounded by that smell, have a nap in that scent, or just sit there enveloped in the olfactory delight of aging whisky. I can’t wait.