Suntory looks for different water, and finds it in the mountains.

Hakushu is a single malt Japanese whisky and the distillery that makes it, owned by Suntory. The distillery stands in the Toribara district of the former town of Hakushu, now part of the city of Hokuto in Yamanashi Prefecture, and English Wikipedia places its founding in 1973, in the forest on the slopes of Mount Kaikoma in the Southern Japanese Alps.

The date was chosen with care. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the whisky writers Mamoru Tsuchiya and Stefan Van Eycken, says 1973 was the 50th anniversary of Suntory’s first distillery at Yamazaki, and that Hakushu was built under the company’s second president, Keizo Saji, as its second malt whisky distillery. Japan was in the middle of a whisky boom, and the new site was meant to secure malt whisky for blends. Saji wanted malt of a different character from Yamazaki’s, the same article says, so he looked for a very different setting: Hakushu sits about 708 metres above sea level, against Yamazaki’s 25, and is on average about five degrees cooler, according to Van Eycken.

The first still house was completed in February 1973 and a second followed in 1977, Japanese Wikipedia says, both fitted with matching stills that turned out large volumes of a single, light style. In 1981 Suntory built a third still house with smaller stills in many shapes, a change of policy towards making a wider range of malt whiskies. From 1988 the older buildings were called Hakushu West and the new one Hakushu East; production at West stopped soon after, and the distillery known today as Hakushu is the East site of 1981. English Wikipedia gives the same split between West and East.

Today Hakushu runs 16 pot stills of varied shapes and sizes, wooden washbacks and a cooperage on site, Japanese Wikipedia says, citing Tsuchiya. In December 2010 a Coffey-type continuous still was added for grain whisky, and grain production formally began in May 2013, the distillery’s 40th year.

A distillery in a forest, and a malt named after its town.

The brand’s defining image is its setting. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Tsuchiya and Van Eycken, says the site covers about 825,000 square metres, the largest of any Japanese whisky distillery, that about 83 per cent of it is left undeveloped to protect the natural environment, and that it is known as the “forest distillery.” The surrounding forest is part of a UNESCO biosphere area and a sanctuary for around 60 species of wild birds; Van Eycken quotes Suntory as saying that wild birds are very sensitive to changes in local water quality and so make a good barometer.

Water is the other half of the story. Japanese Wikipedia says the distillery uses soft subterranean water from Mount Kaikoma, filtered through granite, and that Suntory’s Minami Alps Tennensui bottled water is drawn on the same site. A whisky museum opened there in 1979, in a building modelled on an old kiln at Yamazaki.

As a single malt, Hakushu arrived in stages. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the Japan Whisky Information Center, gives the release of Hakushu 12 Years in 1994, the 18-year-old in 2006, the 25-year-old in 2008 and a no-age-statement Hakushu in Japan on 29 May 2012; English Wikipedia lists the no-age bottling as a 2014 addition to the core range, with limited Heavily Peated and Sherry Cask editions in 2013 and 2014. Suntory’s product site, as summarised by Japanese Wikipedia, lists gold medals at the International Spirits Challenge and the International Wine & Spirits Competition from 2006 onward. The malt also goes into Suntory blends, including Hibiki and Kakubin.

The bottle has become shorthand for the brand. A 2013 feature in Whisky Magazine Japan pairing Hakushu with the American bourbon Maker’s Mark ran under the headline “Red Top × Green Bottle,” the green bottle being Hakushu’s.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all whisky names: WhistlePig, Rittenhouse, Hakushu, Mars Shinshu, Slane, Roe & Co and The Sexton. Whisky brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family distilleries 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 hotel bar.

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, matured 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.

A malt in demand, and a name with two meanings.

Demand has shaped the range. In May 2018 Bloomberg reported that Suntory would stop selling Hakushu 12 Years in Japan from around June, and Hibiki 17 Years later that year, because aged stock could not keep up with demand, the first time the company had halted sales of a product; Japan Today reported the same timing, while Shanken News Daily gave the end of 2018.

Hakushu sits inside one of Japan’s largest drinks groups. Suntory traces its roots to the Osaka wine shop of Shinjiro Torii, and Hakushu malt reaches drinkers both on its own and through the group’s blends. The distillery also works as a test bench: Japanese Wikipedia, citing Tsuchiya, says Suntory now trials grain whisky styles on the small Hakushu continuous still before making them in volume at its Chita distillery.

The name needs a little care. Hakushu is also the name of the former town in Yamanashi where the distillery stands, merged into Hokuto in 2004, so searches for it can turn up the place as well as the whisky. The wordmark has its own page on this site: see what font Hakushu uses.

For a design guide, Hakushu shows how a whisky brand can be built around a place rather than a person: a mountain, a forest and the water that runs through them, carried by a green bottle and a quiet name. Compare Mars Shinshu, the Hombo Shuzo distillery in the Central Alps of Nagano, and Kirin, the Japanese brewer. For this guide we use forest green, pine and mountain mist with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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