Sakurao distillery: Hiroshima’s whisky and gin maker

Sakurao (桜尾) distillery sits on Hiroshima Bay, across the water from the famous floating torii gate of Miyajima, and makes both single malt whisky and a widely praised craft gin from the same set of custom copper stills. It is the modern whisky-making arm of a company that has been producing alcohol in the same coastal town since 1918, which gives Sakurao a rare combination for a “new” Japanese distillery: barely a decade of whisky production behind a full century of distilling experience.

What is Sakurao distillery

Sakurao is operated by Sakurao Brewery & Distillery Co., formerly known as Chugoku Jozo, based in the Sakurao district of Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. The company built its dedicated whisky and gin distillery in December 2017 to mark its 100th anniversary, with distillation starting in January 2018. Unusually among Japan’s newer distilleries, Sakurao makes both single malt whisky and craft gin side by side, using the site’s custom still setup for both spirits. Readers new to the category can see how a distillery like this fits into the wider rules in our guide to what counts as Japanese whisky.

Location and history

Chugoku Jozo was founded in October 1918 in Hatsukaichi, initially producing sake, shochu, and mirin, and was reorganized as a joint-stock company in 1938. That same year, the company began selling its own domestically produced whisky, a category-two “ji-whisky” sold under the Glory Whisky Extra name, blending imported malt with house-made spirit rather than distilling malt whisky on its own stills. Chugoku Jozo kept that product on the market for over five decades, until Japan’s 1989 tax law reform eliminated the ji-whisky category and forced the company to rethink how it sold whisky at all. From around 1990 the company built a separate reputation with Togouchi, a whisky brand matured in a former railway tunnel in the mountains of Togouchi, Hiroshima — at the time made using whisky distilled elsewhere and aged locally, rather than spirit distilled on site. The Togouchi Whisky brand itself was formally launched in 2003, with a lineup running from non-age-statement bottlings up to 18 years old, filling the gap left when the older Glory Whisky Extra line ended. That tunnel-ageing project gave the company decades of maturation experience well before it ever ran its own stills.

The turning point came with the company’s centenary. To mark 100 years in business, Chugoku Jozo rebranded as Sakurao Brewery & Distillery and opened the new Sakurao Distillery on the coast at Hatsukaichi in December 2017, with the first distillation run in January 2018. The move meant that, for the first time, whisky sold under the Sakurao and Togouchi names could include spirit actually distilled at the company’s own facility rather than sourced whisky matured on site. The distillery released its first single malt expressions under both the Sakurao and Togouchi names on July 1, 2021.

How Sakurao whisky and gin are made

Sakurao’s stills were custom-built by Arnold Holstein in Germany, including a hybrid pot-and-column still reported to be capable of reaching very high alcohol strengths, a feature that lets the same equipment handle both whisky new-make and the more delicate botanical distillation gin requires. The distillery has not published detailed figures on total still count, cask inventory, or annual production volume, so this guide does not attempt to state them.

The hybrid design is a direct import of thinking from the company’s shochu-making history rather than a standard Scottish whisky setup. The first distillation runs for around four hours using only the pot-still section, sending vapor straight to the condenser; the second distillation takes closer to 46 hours, routing vapor from the pot section up through the column to refine it further. The distillery has said the extra complexity of that two-stage process is deliberate, aimed at producing a sweeter, more approachable new-make spirit than a straightforward pot-still run would give. Malt grinding is handled on a four-roller mill, with the grits-to-husk-to-flour ratio set at 6:2:2; asked about that choice, the distillery’s development lead, Taihei Yamamoto, said simply that “thinking about fermentation, this works fine,” pointing to a process decided by trial and result rather than by copying a template. Fermentation runs 65 to 72 hours in water-jacketed washbacks that allow close temperature control through the process.

The dual-purpose setup is central to Sakurao’s identity: rather than building a whisky distillery and a gin distillery separately, the company runs both spirits through variations of the same still house, drawing on water from the nearby Oze River. Sakurao Gin uses seventeen botanicals sourced largely from the Hiroshima region, including yuzu, lemon, Japanese cypress, oyster shell, and cherry blossom, tying the gin directly to the local coastline and hills the way the whisky ties back to the Togouchi mountains. The distillery has also used the gin business to fund small local conservation efforts, including support for the juniper-growing forestland the brand draws on, treating ingredient sourcing as an ongoing relationship with the region rather than a one-time purchase.

Maturation is split geographically, and the company has been explicit about why. “Because Hiroshima has both sea and mountains with differing environments, it creates whiskies where individual character flourishes,” the distillery has said of the decision to run two separate warehouses rather than one. Sakurao-labelled whisky ages at the distillery itself, on the coast facing Hiroshima Bay, where warm air off the sea and cool air off the surrounding Chugoku mountains meet and produce a wide swing in temperature through the year; the company credits that swing directly with speeding up maturation and giving the whisky its gentle, salt-tinged character from the Seto Inland Sea air. Togouchi-labelled whisky continues the brand’s original practice of ageing in the cooler mountain conditions of Togouchi, inside a disused railway tunnel that once served a rail line planned in the 1970s and abandoned before completion. The tunnel holds a near-constant 15°C and 80 percent humidity year-round, conditions humid enough that casks there lose almost none of their volume to evaporation, unlike the typical 2 to 3 percent a year lost at many Japanese warehouses; the high humidity instead lets moisture pass into the whisky through the wood, gradually lowering its strength even as the volume in the cask barely changes. The company treats this as a genuine style difference between the two labels rather than simple rebranding, and it is one of the more distinctive pieces of Sakurao’s story: two single malt brands, one distillery, two separate maturation environments chosen specifically because Hiroshima has both a coastline and a mountain range to offer.

The site itself sits directly on Hiroshima Bay, facing the World Heritage-listed island of Miyajima across the water, and the coastal setting is something the company leans on in how it presents both spirits: sea-influenced maturation for Sakurao, cooler inland maturation for Togouchi, and a gin recipe built around botanicals foraged from the same stretch of Hiroshima coastline and hills. Few Japanese distilleries can point to a comparably direct link between the geography visitors can see from the tasting room and the flavor story told about the spirit in the glass.

Main Sakurao and Togouchi bottles to know

Because the company runs two whisky brands from one site, the range can be confusing at first glance. The table below separates the core single malt lines from the older, more widely available blended Togouchi products.

The Togouchi blended range, particularly the Premium and aged expressions, has the longest export track record of anything the company makes and remains the easiest Sakurao-group product to find on a well-stocked shelf outside Japan. That track record is a direct descendant of the sourced-whisky business the company built from 2003 onward, long before it distilled a drop of malt spirit itself. The newer single malts under both names carry a shorter, more limited history and correspondingly tighter allocations, and buyers new to the brand are generally better served starting with the established Togouchi blends before chasing the harder-to-find single malt editions.

Visiting Sakurao distillery

Sakurao is one of the more visitor-friendly distilleries on this list, helped by its location a short walk from JR Hatsukaichi Station and its position on the standard route toward Miyajima. The company runs a dedicated visitor centre at the distillery, offering guided tours of around 90 minutes that walk visitors through malting, saccharification, distillation, and maturation, finishing with a tasting in an on-site lounge. Tours are reported to run in English as well as Japanese, and reservations are generally required through the distillery’s own website at least a week ahead of a visit. Tour pricing has been reported at roughly ¥2,000 including tastings, though prices and offerings can change and are worth confirming directly before booking.

For travellers already heading to Miyajima, a stop at Sakurao is one of the more practical distillery visits in western Japan, combining easily with a day that also takes in the shrine and torii gate across the water. The visitor centre shop also stocks distillery-exclusive gin and whisky releases not always available through export retailers.

Can you find Sakurao or Togouchi outside Japan?

Yes, more reliably than most small Japanese distilleries, thanks to Togouchi’s long export history. Togouchi’s blended whiskies have been sold through European and North American specialist retailers for years, giving the brand name-recognition well ahead of the newer single malts. The single malt Sakurao and Togouchi releases, being more recent and produced in smaller volumes, are harder to find and more likely to appear through specialist whisky shops than general retailers. Sakurao Gin has also picked up international stockists as craft gin interest has grown. Our guides on where to buy Japanese whisky in the UK and where to buy Japanese whisky in the US cover the retailer types most likely to stock both the established blends and the newer single malts.

Buyers on a budget should note that the Togouchi blended line is one of the more affordable, widely available entry points into Japanese whisky as a category, a theme covered in more depth in our roundup of Japanese whisky under $100.

What a Sakurao or Togouchi bottle offers that most Japanese single malts cannot is a documented, decades-long relationship with whisky as a category that predates the distillery itself: a company that sold blended whisky under its own name in the 1930s, kept a mountain tunnel maturing sourced spirit through the lean years after 1989, and only then built stills of its own, borrowed in part from its shochu know-how. For a drinker, that means the “newness” of Sakurao single malt is really the final step in a much longer story, not a start from zero.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• SAKURAO Brewery and Distillery — official site (English)
• 桜尾・戸河内 SINGLE MALT — SAKURAO DISTILLERY official site (Japanese)
• 桜尾蒸留所 — Japan Whisky Information Center (Japanese)
• 広島初のシングルモルトウイスキーが生産開始【前半】 — WHISKY Magazine Japan (Japanese)
• 広島初のシングルモルトウイスキーが生産開始【後半】 — WHISKY Magazine Japan (Japanese)
• 時代に寄り添いながら、新たな挑戦を続ける！桜尾蒸留所訪問記 — ACORN / The Whiskyplus (Japanese)
• ハンパじゃないエンジェルズ・シェア 桜尾蒸留所《戸河内貯蔵庫》 — ウイスキー日記 (Japanese)
• Sakurao Distillery — Togouchi official site
• Sakurao — Whisky Auctioneer
• Single Malt Whisky “Sakura-o” & “Togouchi” released — Japanese Whisky Dictionary