A sake family, a sold-off distillery and the stock that started a brand.

The Chichibu distillery is the work of Ichiro Akuto, whose family had brewed sake for generations. English Wikipedia says the Akuto family’s brewery dates back to 1625 and later moved to Hanyu, in Saitama Prefecture, where as Toa Shuzo it ran the Hanyu whisky distillery. The Guardian reported in 2016 that Akuto’s grandfather took out a distilling licence the year after the Second World War ended, and that his father went on making whisky with two stills imported from Scotland. Akuto himself worked in sales at Suntory before joining the family firm, English Wikipedia says.

The family business did not survive. English Wikipedia says Toa Shuzo entered civil rehabilitation proceedings in 2000 and was sold in 2004, and that the new owner planned to dispose of the Hanyu whisky stock if nobody bought it. Akuto took the casks himself. With the help of Sasanokawa Shuzo, a brewer in Fukushima Prefecture, he stored them in its warehouses, and in 2004 he founded Venture Whisky to sell them as Ichiro’s Malt. The Japanese Whisky Information Center says the first Ichiro’s Malt bottlings were made from those rescued casks, some finished in other woods.

The best known of those releases became the Card Series. Each bottling of Hanyu whisky was labelled with a playing card, The Guardian reported, and the Japanese Whisky Information Center says 54 different cards, in 58 bottlings, had been released by 2014. English Wikipedia says the series has set several auction records. It also gave Venture Whisky a name before it had a distillery of its own. In its first years, English Wikipedia says, Ichiro’s Malt was released through Sasanokawa Shuzo, in borrowed wine bottles, with the brewer’s name on the label.

Mizunara washbacks, Forsyths stills and a second distillery.

Akuto opened his own distillery in 2007 in Chichibu, a mountain town about 100 kilometres north-west of Tokyo, and it began distilling in February 2008, according to the Japanese Whisky Information Center. It was the first new whisky distillery licensed in Japan for 35 years, English Wikipedia says, and it arrived when Japanese whisky was in what the Information Center calls its “winter era,” with domestic consumption at about a fifth of its early-1980s peak. The Information Center credits its success with helping to start Japan’s boom in craft distilleries.

The distillery is small and deliberate. The Information Center says each batch uses just 400 kilograms of malt; the mash tun and pot stills were made by Forsyths of Scotland, and the washbacks are made of Japanese mizunara oak, which it describes as a world first. Alongside imported malt, Chichibu uses barley grown in Saitama, including a two-row variety called Sainohoshi, and has taken up floor malting. The Guardian reported in 2016 that most of its barley then came from Norfolk, that the company kept about 4,000 casks, and that its in-house cooperage was turning Japanese oak into casks.

The first single malt made entirely at the distillery, Chichibu The First, appeared in 2011, English Wikipedia says, and a 10-year-old, The First Ten, followed in 2020. Since 2014 the town has held the Chichibu Whisky Matsuri, a festival of Japanese and overseas spirits. In 2016 Venture’s brand ambassador Yumi Yoshikawa told The Guardian that the company set out to make “whiskies with character that are not necessarily balanced or easy to drink.”

Demand outran the first distillery. In 2019 Venture Whisky opened Chichibu Daini, its second distillery, about 600 metres away in the Midorigaoka industrial estate, and began production that October, the Information Center says. It makes about five times as much spirit, using two-tonne batches, gas-fired direct-heated stills and washbacks of French oak ordered from the cooper Taransaud. Its first official single malt, Ichiro’s Malt Chichibu Distillery II, came out in 2025.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all whisky distilleries from India, Japan and Australia: Paul John, Rampur, Indri, Chichibu, Kanosuke, Starward and Lark. Whisky distilleries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A whisky brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its whisky is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its whisky is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still independent, and now in Hokkaido too.

Chichibu is owned by Venture Whisky Ltd, the company Akuto founded, which is based in Chichibu and which he leads as president, according to The Guardian in 2016 and the Saitama Shimbun in 2024. The Saitama Shimbun reported in March 2024 that Whisky Magazine had inducted Akuto, president and master blender of Venture Whisky, into its Hall of Fame at a ceremony in London on 20 March, the fifth Japanese person to be so honoured; the organisers cited his part in reviving Japan’s whisky industry after its long slump.

The company has since grown beyond Saitama. On 16 January 2026 the Hokkaido Shimbun reported that a subsidiary of Venture Whisky had begun production at a new distillery in the Tomakomai-tobu area of Hokkaido, with the first shipments planned for 2029. English Wikipedia says the site makes grain whisky in a Coffey still, for blending with malt from the two Chichibu distilleries. English Wikipedia says the Double Distilleries bottling blended Chichibu and Hanyu whisky until 2025 and now blends whisky from the two Chichibu distilleries.

Two names do the brand work. Ichiro’s Malt carries the founder’s first name and covers most releases, while Chichibu marks whisky made at the distillery itself. The town’s Chichibu Shrine is one of the venues of the whisky festival, English Wikipedia says. Our separate note on the Chichibu font looks at the wordmark.

For a design guide, Chichibu shows how a small distillery can build a name from a founder’s first name, a town and a rescued family stock rather than a long corporate history. Compare Nikka, the Japanese whisky maker founded by Masataka Taketsuru, and Kanosuke, one of the newer Japanese distilleries. For this guide we use forest green, mizunara oak and valley mist with a restrained sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Chichibu’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.