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.
Why this matters
The operator behind the new Sawamachi distillery is not a whisky newcomer with no track record, it is Rita Farm & Winery, a small natural-wine producer founded in Yoichi in 2013 by winemaker Yukiko Sugawara (菅原由利子). The winery takes its name from Rita Taketsuru (竹鶴リタ), the Scottish-born wife of Nikka founder Masataka Taketsuru, after the farmland Sugawara took over turned out to have once belonged to a neighbor who had lived alongside the Taketsuru couple. Converting an old warehouse on the Nutchi river in Yoichi’s historic Sawamachi district into a whisky distillery is this winemaking family’s extension of a story that already runs through the town, rather than an outside investor arriving to cash in on Yoichi’s name.
The financing model is the more unusual part. Rather than raising capital from banks or spirits investors, the project worked with Sapporo-based alyawmu Inc. to fund casks through Japan’s hometown-tax (furusato nozei) donation system, pairing each donation with an NFT recording cask ownership. That structure matters beyond this one distillery: it is one of a handful of experiments testing whether Japan’s furusato nozei scheme, originally built to let city dwellers redirect tax revenue to rural towns in exchange for local goods, can also bankroll new craft distilleries that would otherwise struggle to raise capital in a tightening market for maturing Japanese whisky stock.
For readers outside Japan
This is not a product readers outside Japan can currently buy into. Furusato nozei is a Japanese income- and resident-tax mechanism, open in practice only to people who pay tax in Japan, so the cask-ownership shares described here are not available to overseas donors regardless of how much they are willing to pay. Yoichi Sawamachi Whisky has not announced retail bottles, an export plan, or a timeline for when any of this spirit will be sold commercially, since owners themselves vote on when each cask is opened, at the earliest three years after filling.
Readers who want to engage with this story in person rather than by owning a cask have a straightforward option: Nikka’s original Yoichi distillery, a short walk from Sawamachi, still runs public tours and tastings and is the reason the town is on the whisky map at all. For context on the Taketsuru name this new project is quietly invoking, see our review of Taketsuru Pure Malt. Sawamachi is also not the only new Hokkaido project to watch: Cedarfield’s US-backed distillery build in Hokkaido is following a very different, foreign-investment-led path to the same region. Between a foreign-capital newcomer and a crowdfunded, tax-scheme-financed local project, the two cases show how differently new Japanese whisky ventures are being built in the same prefecture at the same time.
Source: PR TIMES (Japanese)
Primary sources: alyawmu/Yoichi NFT furusato nozei project announcement (Japanese, PR TIMES) and Yoichi town history on Rita Taketsuru (Japanese).