Kiuchi Makes Sake, Beer, Shochu, Whisky and Umeshu. One House.

There is one producer we carry across more categories than any other, and most people who order from them do not realise they have done it twice in a night.

Kiuchi Brewery, in Ibaraki, since 1823.

The Owl Did What Two Centuries Could Not

Kiuchi spent its first hundred and seventy years making sake under the name Kikusakari, which is still what they are known for at home.

Then in 1996 they started brewing beer, and the owl on the Hitachino Nest label went further internationally in about a decade than the sake had in two centuries. Most people abroad who know Kiuchi know the owl and nothing else. Ask them what the brewery did before beer and you will usually get a blank.

That order of events is worth holding on to, because everything since has come out of a sake house behaving like a sake house, not out of a beer company diversifying.

Everything They Make Is Built on Something Else They Make

This is the part that makes them unusual rather than merely broad.

Kiuchi no Shizuku is Hitachino White Ale, distilled. Their rice shochu is built off daiginjo lees, then held ten years. Mikibito takes distilled Hitachino Nest, blends it with their own rice shochu, and infuses juniper, yuzu peel, Fukure mikan and cherry blossom leaf, which makes it a gin in everything but the way they talk about it.

Nobody is buying in neutral spirit and flavouring it. Each product starts as an earlier product, which is only possible because one company holds a sake licence, a brewing licence and a distilling licence at the same address.

The Whisky

Hinomaru is the whisky, and it runs across two distilleries, Nukada and Yasato, the second sitting at the foot of Mount Tsukuba.

We pour the 1st Edition, the Port Cask Finish and the Sakura Cask, and there is a full write-up of the three of them rather than repeating it here. Start with the 1st Edition. The other two are variations, and a variation is meaningless if you have not heard the theme.

There is also an umeshu finished in their own whisky casks, which closes the loop about as neatly as it can be closed: plums steeped in their spirit, resting in the barrels their whisky came out of.

How to Drink Kiuchi Here

Do it as a flight across categories rather than within one.

A Hitachino Nest to start, the rice shochu or the Kiuchi no Shizuku in the middle, and a Hinomaru to finish. Same water, same house, same people, four completely different products, and a through-line you can actually taste once somebody tells you it is there.

That is the most interesting thing on our list that nobody orders on purpose.