Hanyu 12 Year Old Golden Horse Chichibu Bottled July 2008

Hanyu

The history of Hanyu distillery begins in 1941 when the company Toa Shuzo established a liquor production plant in the village of Hanyu as an extension to their sake business. The site initially produced shochu and sake, with any distilled liquors being intended for industrial products and baking ingredients. In the 1970s Tao Shuzo began releasing blended whisky expressions under the Golden Horse brand, utilising malt whisky imported primarily from Aberlour and producing grain whisky in house. These blends were typically less than 4 years in age, with the more premium offerings containing a higher proportion of imported Scottish malt. In 1980, amid the Japanese whisky boom, Tao Shuzo decided to move into malt whisky production and commissioned a pair of pot stills from Miyake, beginning production in 1983. As the company imported its Scottish whisky in casks, they chose to fill their Hanyu newmake into the recently dumped casks. Roughly 80% of Hanyu’s production was in refill hogsheads, with the other 20% being virgin oak.  
 
With a tax reform and a decline in whisky consumption in the later 1980s, suddenly Scotch whisky became incredibly cheap and domestically produced spirits were seen of poor quality and high price. In 1991 Hanyu’s stills would be switched off. In 1996, after working for Suntory for some time, Ichiro Akuto joined Tao Shuzo to help revive the company. He reinvented Hanyu as a single malt whisky with the introduction of Golden Horse Chichibu 8 year old, a well received release that proved there was demand for single malts in Japan. The stills were fired up again in late 1999 and into early 2000, before once again being switched off. In 2004 Tao Shuzo was sold to a shochu producer amid financial difficulties,with the new owner deeming whisky not a part of its future operations. Akuto swooped in and saved the stock, purchasing the remaining 400 casks and going on to establish his own distillery in Chichibu in 2007.