Yoichi Sawamachi Whisky K.K. (余市沢町ウイスキー株式会社), a new distillery in the Sawamachi district of Yoichi (余市), Hokkaido, has announced a members-only cask viewing tour for September 20, 2026. The distillery describes itself as the first new whisky producer to open in Yoichi, the town most famous abroad as the home of Nikka’s coal-fired Yoichi distillery, in around 90 years. The tour is open only to the roughly 900 people who have bought into the distillery’s crowdfunded cask-ownership scheme.
That scheme, called “Whisky Hitokuchi Owner” (one-share owner), is run in partnership with Sapporo-based Aruyaumu Inc. and structured as a hometown-tax (furusato nozei) donation gift. Since 2024, supporters have been able to claim an NFT-based ownership stake in a cask for a ¥70,000 donation, with shares capped at 900. Each cask matures for a minimum of three years and up to ten, and owners vote on when their cask is eventually opened, at three-, five- and seven-year milestones, turning bottling into a participatory decision rather than a date fixed in advance by the distillery.
The September 20 event, running from 1pm with registration from 12:45pm, gives owners roughly 90 minutes to tour the distillery and warehouse, taste from the maturing stock and meet other cask owners through the project’s “machiDAO” community group. The timing matters: the earliest casks, filled in 2024, will reach two years of maturation this winter, the first checkpoint most owners will use to judge how the spirit is developing ahead of any future vote on bottling.
Why it matters beyond Japan
Yoichi’s name recognition overseas rests almost entirely on Nikka’s original distillery, built there in 1934 for its cool climate and coal-fired stills. Yoichi Sawamachi Whisky is an unrelated, much smaller operation, and its ownership model, tying cask shares to Japan’s domestic hometown-tax system, is not structured for overseas buyers the way UK and European cask-investment schemes typically are. No bottling date or export plan has been announced, since that decision sits with the owners themselves. Still, for a market that has watched Yoichi become shorthand for Japanese whisky’s origins, a second working distillery in the same town is worth tracking as its first casks approach maturity.
Source: PR TIMES (Japanese)
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