Yame Whisky: From a Tea Region, by a Sake Brewery

Yame is not a whisky name anyone outside Japan would recognise, and inside Japan it means tea. Specifically it means gyokuro, the shaded green tea that regularly takes the top prizes at the national tea competition and costs what it costs for good reason.

That is the context these bottles arrive in, and it turns out to matter.

The Place

Yame sits inland in Fukuoka, in river valleys with morning fog and big swings between day and night temperature. That combination is why the tea is good there. Slow growth and shade push the leaf toward amino acids rather than tannins, which is where gyokuro's thick, almost brothy sweetness comes from.

The same water and the same climate have supported sake brewing there for a long time. Kitaya has been making sake in Yame since 1820, and the whisky comes out of that house.

A sake brewery making whisky is less strange than it sounds and it is happening across Japan right now. They already have the fermentation knowledge, the water rights, the warehouses and the licences. What they usually lack is time, which is the one input nobody can shortcut.

The Two We Pour

Yame Eight Goddesses, 10 Year. Blended from whiskies matured in oak between ten and thirteen years. The name comes from Yametsu Hime, the deity said to watch over the mountains the region is named for.

To my palate it runs earthy with a spiced edge, and it is not a delicate whisky. That is exactly why it works where it does.

Yame 15 Year. Under a thousand bottles made, with fewer than three hundred sold outside Japan. Deeper and rounder than the 10, and worth drinking neat and slowly. When it is gone it is gone, which is true of a lot of Japanese whisky right now but unusually literal here.

The Matcha Highball

The 10 Year is the base of our matcha highball, and that drink exists because Shinichi san at Wine of Japan handed us the bottle and asked what we would do with it.

The whisky's earthiness is the thing to solve. You can fight it with citrus or you can go with it, and matcha goes with it: also grassy, also faintly bitter, also built on the same vegetal register. It comes out green and genuinely refreshing rather than novel.

There is a certain neatness to a whisky from Japan's most famous tea region ending up in a drink with tea in it. That was not planned. We worked out the pairing first and noticed the coincidence afterwards, which is usually the order these things happen in.

The full story of how we build our highballs, including the carbonation, is here.

How to Drink It

The 10 neat if you want to understand the matcha highball, then the highball to see what changed.

The 15 neat, full stop.

Both go well with grilled food and with anything carrying a bit of char. The earthiness has somewhere to sit.