Japanese Whiskey Distillery Tour

◆Japan's first craft distillery dedicated to grain is established.

Yoshida Denzai Distillery was established by Yoshida Denzai Kogyo, a company that manufactures and sells medical and industrial equipment, as an entry into a different industry. The distillery, which will start full-scale operations in October 2022 in Murakami City, Niigata Prefecture, is Japan's first “craft distillery specializing in grain.

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Currently, most Japanese craft distilleries produce only malt whiskey. Therefore, in order to produce a blended whiskey that meets the standard of “Japanese whiskey” using all domestically produced whiskey, it is necessary to obtain grain whiskey from one of the distilleries in Japan. With an eye on the growing demand for “Japanese blended whiskey” in the future, and with the intention of differentiating themselves from other companies, they chose to specialize in grain. The distillery is usually named after the place where it is located, but they chose the name of the family business because they wanted to be different from other distilleries by using grain instead of malt.

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Tadashi Matsumoto, the third president of Yoshida Denzai Kogyo and the head of the distillery, has a degree in agriculture. He also brewed wine at university. Furthermore, after graduation, he worked for Kewpie, where he acquired expertise in food factory operations. Although he entered a different industry, he has a background that goes beyond just being a “whiskey lover.
 
 　The main source of the brewing water is groundwater from the Arakawa River, which was once selected as the cleanest first-class river in Japan, and is soft water with a hardness of around 57 mg/ℓ. Dent corn and rye malt are used as ingredients, but first they are put into three grain bins (containers) for mixing, and then crushed using a hammer mill made by Takarada Kogyo.
 The cooker, which is the equivalent of a mash tun in malt whiskey, is made of stainless steel by Kote of Germany. It has a capacity of 5,000 liters, and unlike the mash tun, it is not filtered. The fermentation tanks are made of stainless steel by Bockmeyer of Germany, with a capacity of 5,800 liters and a height of about 5 meters, standing in a forest of six units.

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The still is a hybrid type of a helmet-shaped pot still (5,000 liter capacity) and an 8-stage column still (● meters long), both made by the same company as the cooker, Cote. It is similar to the still used at the Coval distillery in Chicago. In fact, Coval holds the license rights to Cote in the U.S. and has supplied equipment to nearly 200 craft distilleries in the U.S. At Yoshida Denzai's first distillation in early October, Robert Bernecker, the founder of Coval, came from the U.S. to attend the event.
 The company's first goal is to produce 100,000 liters (average alcohol content of 62%) with 180 distillations per year, and in the future, they are eager to achieve more than 250 distillations per year.

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◆Entered a different industry from the seal industry Continued to expand with curiosity and ideas

　It takes about 10 minutes by car from JR Niigata Station. The Niigata Kameda Distillery produces whiskey in an area known as the Kameda Industrial Park.

 The parent company is Otani Corporation, the largest seal manufacturer, which operates 120 stores nationwide under the name “Hanko Otani. Hiroyuki Doda, director of the company and founder of the distillery, said, “The seal industry is a business only in Japan. I wanted to deal with the world,” and launched the joint venture Niigata Small-Scale Distillery in 2019. He decided to enter the whiskey industry because if he was going to start a new business, he wanted to try something he really liked, and set up the distillery on the premises of his Hanko factory. Although the new Corona delayed the installation of equipment, etc., distillation began in February 2021.

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All fermentation tanks changed to wooden ones
 Automatic malting machines are now used for in-house malting.
 
 　One batch at the Niigata Kameda Distillery contains 400 kg of malt, with water from the Agano River used as the brewing water. In order to malt the Niigata barley in-house, a fully automatic malting machine made in China was introduced in the summer of 2022. The machine can handle soaking, germination, mixing, and drying in a single operation, and can handle one ton of barley at a time. The company plans to start using the machine in the fall of 2022.

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The malt is milled in an Alan Ruddock roller mill, and for saccharification, a full Leutertan made by Cheiman of Germany is used. Cheiman is a specialized manufacturer of beer production equipment, and their mash tans have a reputation for superior extraction of clarified wort. Mr. Doda, who aims for a clean and gorgeous sake quality similar to Niigata's sake, is very particular in his choice of mash tanner.

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 Washback has replaced its original three stainless steel fermenters with white oak fermenters made by Garbelotto of Italy. Together with the company's existing acacia wood fermenters, the company now has six wooden fermenters. Each has a capacity of 3,200 liters, and each holds 2,000 liters of wort. A mixture of distiller's yeast and ale yeast is used, and a new yeast tank for ale yeast culture was installed around spring 2022.

 　The pot stills are made by Forsyth, with a 2,000-liter capacity lantern-type first distillation unit and a 1,400-liter capacity bulge-type redistillation unit. In the summer of 2022, sub-coolers (auxiliary coolers) were additionally installed in both the first and second distillation units. This improves the efficiency of the cooling process.

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The barrel ageing rate is 63%. In addition to using several aging rooms in Niigata Prefecture, the company has begun using containers set up on its premises as aging rooms in order to try aging in different environments. The interior is dunnage-type, stacked three to four high.
 
He hopes to eventually use cold storage containers as well, and is creating new ideas one after another.

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