Hokkaido JSEE Trip 3: Nikka's Yoichi Distillery Tour

Ana opted for us to visit a zoo on her day of tourism, but my aim was for something a bit rarer and with rather fewer motorized stuffed animal carts.  Nikka Whiskey is the more serious of the two Japanese companies that make whiskey in Japan. The other is Suntory, a huge conglomerate, while Nikka only makes whiskey.  Nikka has two distilleries in Japan, with one near the tsunami disaster area around Sendai, and the other being an hour or so outside of Sapporo in the very small town of Yoichi.  For my day of tourism we visited this distillery.  More pictures can be found on Flickr.

Getting train tickets to Yoichi wasn't a problem since the station, the town, and the distillery all share the same name.  The trains start getting pretty small and locally-based a while before getting out there, but it wasn't that long a trip and the weather was very nice.  When we arrived at Yoichi Station, we had two problems.  One, the coin lockers at the station were not big enough to accommodate our main luggage bag, which was the "medium" of my set of three.  We were not looking forward to having to roll the bag around for the entire visit.  Two, the brochure did not say how to get from the train station to the distillery!  We had limited time to blunder about, and were considering hiring a taxi when we looked out the windows of the station and realized the distillery was, in fact, right in front of us.

 No taxi required.  Taken from the front steps of the station.

 We walked the grueling ~350 feet of sidewalk to the entrance, and found that they had full-sized coin lockers with prices so low as to be pretty much nominal.  With both problems solved and an English-language tour map in hand (free admission too) we set off.

 It turned out that they had videos discussing each step of the whiskey production process in little kiosks around the grounds, one for each main step, and these videos were available in four languages, including English.  We were in pretty good shape for understanding what we were seeing, which is not always the case in Japanese tourist destinations.  We saw the fires under the distillation columns being fed here - I'm pretty sure that this could be done with suitable precision with gas instead of coal since only the heat reaches the product, but this is probably a traditional aspect of the production that has been retained.

 Being mechanical engineers, we noted that each still was shaped differently and speculated on the methods of construction for large copper pressure vessels.  Current thinking is that some of these were made of plates shaped and hammered together until no seam could be seen.

 I checked - the warehouses they let people into contain only empty casks.  The real warehouses with the actual whiskey are not shown on the tours, hindering my plot to roll a barrel out the back when nobody was looking.

 They had a Nikka Whiskey Museum with all manner of rare and prizewinning examples of their craft, most of which are not for sale in the bar in the back of the museum at any price.

 After completing the tour, we headed up to the free tasting room, where they had their standard single-malt and a fancier blended whiskey available for tasting, along with some kind of apple brandy they apparently produce from time to time.  These aren't particularly special spirits, but the price was right and we'd just spent an hour or so watching videos and seeing things related to whiskey so we were certainly not going to complain, especially with the great views out the windows.

 

I went by the shop on the way out and picked up a few things that can't be had in stores.  They don't let people taste these before buying, but they had glasses out that you were allowed to smell.  Being single-cask examples, they could be better / worse / different than the moderated single-malts achieved by mixing together many barrels and targeting a consistent expression of a brand.  Each of the single-barrels by year must also change considerably every few weeks, when they run out of one barrel and bring out another.  The smells coming off of these two were very interesting and pleasant and I look forward to enjoying them in very small quantities over a long period of time.  By volume, they ranged between considerably to exceptionally more expensive than I usually prefer to pay for whiskey, but since both bottles are undersized it didn't break the bank.

 

 The train back towards Sapporo was one car.  Yoichi is in the sticks.  We went directly from Yoichi to the airport on the far side of Sapporo, where we surveyed their many dining options for a late lunch / early dinner meal.

 Once again guys, this is NOT an American-style diner. 

 We ended up deciding that dessert sounded better than either lunch or dinner and got crepes instead.

After that, we made the trip back to Kanazawa without incident, and it may be noted without ever once being asked for ID before boarding the plane, having to take our shoes off, or any scan more advanced than a metal detector, which was a pleasant way to do it.

This post concludes the JSEE/Hokkaido series of posts - next up will be those related to the visit of some friends of ours from the states.  We had quite a schedule of fun things to do worked out, including our first trip to see sumo live, so look forward to those posts coming up in soon.