Japan Whisky Press is written and edited by KEYAKI, who keeps a private whisky bar at home in Japan and reads the Japanese trade press the rest of the week.
Why this publication exists
Almost everything written in English about Japanese whisky is written by people who cannot read Japanese and have never drunk in a Japanese whisky bar. The announcements arrive late, rewritten two or three times, with the detail that matters stripped out — which cask, how many bottles, what it replaced, whether anyone outside Japan will ever see it.
This site is the other way around. The Japanese original is the starting point, and the person reading it opens these bottles.
Who writes this
KEYAKI is a writer and editor based in Japan who has spent years around Japanese whisky.
- Keeps a private whisky bar at home. It is not a commercial bar and nothing here is sold. Bottles get opened and poured for guests rather than left sealed as investments — which is why we can say which releases people ask for a second time, and which ones sit on the shelf once the initial excitement passes.
- Drinks in Japan’s whisky bars. That is where you hear what is actually happening — which distillery has changed something, what the next allocation looks like, which bottle has quietly doubled.
- Has working relationships with Japanese wholesalers. It is one of the things that informs what we write about price and availability, alongside the published record and what we see in the market ourselves.
- Publishes Private Whisky Lab Keyaki, a Japanese-language whisky publication.
KEYAKI is a pen name. The background above is real, and everything we publish is checked against it.
What we have tasted, and what we have not
We separate the two, every time.
- Where an article describes how something tastes from first-hand experience, it is written in the first person and says so plainly.
- Where it does not, we do not invent one. We report what the distillery, the blender or the published record says, with the source named — and we say whose assessment it is.
A tasting note with no one standing behind it is worth nothing. We would rather tell you we have not opened a bottle than pretend we have.
Disclosure
KEYAKI keeps a private, non-commercial whisky bar and has working relationships with Japanese wholesalers. Those relationships are a source of information. They are not a source of coverage.
No distillery, importer, wholesaler or retailer pays for a mention, sees an article before publication, or has any say in what we cover. Some retailer links are affiliate links and some pages carry advertising; neither decides what we write about. See our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.
Corrections
We correct errors openly and quickly, with a dated note on the article. If something here is wrong — a figure, a date, a name, a claim about a bottle you own — tell us.