Akkeshi Taisetsu: A Whisky Named for a Two-Week Season

Most whisky series are numbered, or named after the founder, or named nothing at all. Akkeshi picked a calendar, and committed to it in a way that is either admirable or slightly mad.

The 24 Sekki

Before Japan adopted the Western calendar it used a solar system inherited from China that splits the year into 24 divisions. Each one runs roughly fifteen days and carries a name describing what the natural world is doing.

Risshun, the start of spring. Keichitsu, when insects wake and come out of the ground. Shosho, small heat. Taisho, great heat. Their names are agricultural instructions as much as descriptions, and they were what a farming country actually ran on. They are still printed on Japanese calendars and still used in cooking, poetry and the tea ceremony to mark when things change.

There are also 72 finer subdivisions, the ko, running about five days each, with names like "the east wind melts the ice."

Fifteen days is a very short season. That is the point. It is a way of paying attention to a year at a resolution most calendars do not bother with.

Taisetsu

Taisetsu is great snowfall, the twenty-first of the 24, falling in early December. It is the stretch when the days have gone properly short, snow settles and stays, and the animals have gone under.

Akkeshi is releasing a whisky for each of the 24, and this is the ninth. Working through the full set takes as long as it takes, which for a distillery founded in 2016 is a serious statement about what they think they are doing.

Why Hokkaido Can Do This

Akkeshi Town is on Hokkaido's eastern coast: cold, fogbound, surrounded by peat bog and facing the sea.

The distillery was built specifically because that description also fits Islay. They use peated malt, they mature by the water, and the coastal air gets into the casks. They also use mizunara, the Japanese oak that is difficult to work with, leaks if you cut it wrong, and gives back sandalwood and incense if you get it right.

The result is a whisky that reads as Scottish in structure and Japanese in detail.

What Is In the Glass

Soft peat smoke over vanilla and sea salt, candied citrus, a little white flower. Then honey and roasted chestnut, lemon peel, layered spice. The finish is long and warm, with oak, salt air and a savoury note that lingers past where you expect it to stop.

The smoke is present throughout and never takes over, which is harder to achieve than making a whisky that simply tastes of smoke.

How to Drink It

Neat first. One large ice sphere afterwards if you want it opened up, since the cold pushes the smoke back and lets the honey forward.

It goes with grilled fish, smoked things, and anything with real umami behind it. Miso eggplant, soy-braised pork belly. Smoke and fermented soy get along extremely well, which is not a coincidence: both are built on the same kind of slow, dark depth.