Suntory: The Company That Sold Japan Whisky Twice

Suntory gets described as the founder of Japanese whisky, which is true and undersells it. They did the hard part twice, about eighty years apart, and the second time is the reason there is a highball on our menu at all.

1923

Torii Shinjiro was selling imported wine and wanted to make a whisky for Japanese palates rather than a copy of Scotch. In 1923 he broke ground at Yamazaki, between Kyoto and Osaka, on Japan's first commercial whisky distillery.

To run it he hired Taketsuru Masataka, who had studied chemistry in Glasgow and apprenticed in Scottish distilleries, and who had come home with notebooks that are still the founding document of the whole industry.

The two of them disagreed. Taketsuru wanted a cold northern site like Scotland's. Torii wanted to be near the population that would drink it, and wanted a lighter whisky that suited how Japanese people actually ate. Taketsuru left in the thirties, went north to Hokkaido, and founded what became Nikka.

So the two largest whisky companies in Japan come from one argument about what Japanese whisky should taste like, and both answers turned out to be correct.

Suntory later added Hakushu, high in the mountains of Yamanashi, and Chita for grain whisky. Having malt distilleries in different climates plus their own grain plant is why they can blend entirely in-house.

The Collapse

By the nineties whisky in Japan was in serious decline. Shochu had taken the casual drinker, the tax structure had shifted, and whisky had acquired an image problem: something formal, expensive, and for older men in members' clubs.

Sales fell for roughly two decades. This is the part usually skipped over, and it matters, because the current worldwide scramble for Japanese whisky is happening on inventory laid down during years when nobody wanted it.

2008

Suntory's answer was not a new whisky. It was a serving suggestion.

They pushed the Kaku highball hard: Kakubin, their ordinary square-bottled blend, poured over ice with soda. They built dedicated highball towers and put them in bars around the country in the summer of 2008.

It worked to a degree that still looks unreasonable. Whisky shipments rose two years running, and by 2009 the Japanese whisky market was roughly seventeen percent larger than it had been in 2007. A category in twenty-year decline turned around because a company convinced people to stop treating whisky as an occasion and start treating it as something you drink with dinner.

That reframing is the direct ancestor of what we pour. Our house highball is built on Suntory Toki, and the carbonation system we built for it exists because that drink deserves the attention.

What We Pour

Toki is a blend across Yamazaki, Hakushu and Chita. Crisp green apple, white pepper, a clean slightly sweet finish. It is the house highball for good reasons: it holds its shape against soda and does not demand that you concentrate on it.

Yamazaki 12 is the flagship single malt, married from American oak, sherry casks and mizunara. Peach and pineapple first, then vanilla and clove, then the sandalwood note mizunara gives. We wrote separately about why we do not put it in a cocktail. It is one of the three we will build a highball with, and it is the one to have when you are not having three.

We also pour Hakushu when we can get it.