The forest distillery

By the late 1960s, Suntory had been making single malt at Yamazaki for nearly fifty years and the global appetite for Japanese whisky was beginning to grow. Suntory's chief blender at the time, Keizo Saji, made the case for a second distillery — but one that would produce a fundamentally different style. Where Yamazaki was warm, low-altitude and Mizunara-driven, the second distillery would be cold, high, forested, and built around freshness.

The site they chose was the Hakushu plateau in the foothills of the Southern Japanese Alps, in Yamanashi Prefecture, around two hours west of Tokyo. At roughly 700 metres above sea level, the new distillery would become one of the highest-altitude whisky distilleries in the world. The forest around it — birch, oak, beech, and the granite-filtered mountain water of the Ojira River — would shape the whisky in ways no other Japanese distillery had attempted. Hakushu opened its doors in 1973.

Why Hakushu — the place

The Hakushu house style — green, fresh, faintly smoky

Hakushu is the freshest single malt in Japanese whisky. The signature notes — green apple, fresh-cut grass, mint, basil, cucumber, green melon, lime, pine — read more like a herb garden than a whisky list. Underneath sits a soft, gentle smoke from the lightly peated portion of the malt. The combination is unlike anything else in world whisky: a single malt that feels as though it was distilled through a forest.

It is, by design, the perfect Highball whisky. Suntory's official Hakushu serve — Hakushu Distiller's Reserve, soda water, plenty of ice and a sprig of fresh mint — is one of the great drinks in the modern Japanese whisky bar canon. The herbal lift of the whisky meets the herbal lift of the mint and the result is one of the most refreshing long drinks in spirits. The aged Hakushu expressions, by contrast, reward slow drinking neat from a tulip glass with a few drops of water.

The Hakushu range

Hakushu vs Yamazaki — Suntory's two single malts

If Yamazaki is the warmer, fruitier, sherry-and-Mizunara house, Hakushu is the cooler, greener, forest-and-mountain house. The same blending team works across both, and the same Mizunara casks circulate between them, but the spirits themselves come from fundamentally different places — a low-altitude valley near Kyoto versus a high-altitude forest in the Alps. Most Japanese whisky drinkers who get serious about the category eventually own bottles from both. Together, the two distilleries also supply most of the malt component in Hibiki, Suntory's flagship blended whisky.

A note on Hakushu availability

Hakushu's aged expressions have been under significant global allocation pressure since the late 2010s. Hakushu 12 Year Old went through a period of suspension and has returned only in limited quantities; Hakushu 18 and 25 Year Old are produced in deliberately small volumes for the world market. Hakushu Distiller's Reserve remains the most consistently available expression in the range. Prices on aged Hakushu reflect collector demand. Confirmed stock and current pricing for every Hakushu expression we carry is shown on each individual product page.

Awards and global recognition

Hakushu has been a fixture at the top of the world's whisky awards for two decades. Hakushu 25 Year Old was named World's Best Single Malt at the World Whiskies Awards in 2018. Hakushu 18 has collected gold and best-in-class medals at the International Spirits Challenge repeatedly. Hakushu's ascent ran in parallel with sister distillery Yamazaki's rise — together with Suntory's flagship blend Hibiki, the three formed the core of the Japanese whisky boom that took the world by surprise through the 2010s.