![]() Torii asked Taketsuru to calculate a bid for the factory, and he did so. Osaka Station in the 1920s Kotobukiya moves into beer The bank foreclosed on the property, and put it up for auction. The factory sustained damage in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and this combined with the economic environment meant that they couldn’t really stay in business. ![]() Nichiei decided to also name their product “Cascade,” yet they only ever managed to reach about 2% market share. They were using a beer brewing technique developed by Canada’s Cascade Beer. Amongst those competitors was a company called Nichiei Jozo, who had a six-story factory in Yokohama’s Tsurumi district. For the beer industry, however, competition was fierce. This was a period of economic decline in Japan, with failures of multiple banks. Japan got a new emperor in 1926, thus shifting from the Taisho era to the Showa era. Innes, I felt happy that I chose this path in life. Spending those two weeks in the UK countryside, Campbeltown, again with Dr. Innes nosed and tasted the sample new pots that I brought, and said, ‘you did well!’ But he also pointed out a few minor things, and asked me questions about some major aspects to assure that I got everything right. He recalls more about the trip:Īs busy and happy as I was those days, I really enjoyed being back in old Scotland for the first time in a while. Upon arrival, Taketsuru went into the charcoal pit and measured it for himself, getting black with coal in the process. Innes in Scotland, as he had a few outstanding questions that needed answering. Armed with samples of the Yamazaki new pot, Taketsuru took another trip to visit Dr. The first distillation season was complete in June 1925. Even then, Taketsuru still had to show local tax officers how to check for defects/losses and how to record the results of their inspections. The law was revised to say that new pot whisky is an incomplete product, and as a result it should be taxed when shipped. Hoshino initially wouldn’t budge on the tax policy, but after several visits and explanation into the complexities of the Angel’s Share, using Scotland’s taxation as a model, he finally agreed that whisky should be treated differently. Lucky for Taketsuru, he had a relative at the Ministry of Finance, who introduced him to the Osaka Tax Bureau’s Taxation Chief, Naoki Hoshino. Taketsuru writes: “considering defects/loss and interest payments, taxing whisky immediately after distillation makes it impossible to run a whisky business.” He had to get the law changed in order to turn Japanese whisky into a viable business model. So as the years go by, a cask can lose as much as 30-40% of what it originally contained. Generally around 2-3% of what’s in the cask, depending on the climate. ![]() For a whisky maker, this means a significant amount of stock is lost every year. On contact with air, a small amount of the whisky will evaporate – this is referred to as the Angel’s Share. An important part of that maturation is the casks’ absorption of whisky into the porous wood, essentially “breathing” the whisky in and out. Whisky, on the other hand, generally matures in casks for at least a few years. That works fine for beer, sake, and shochu, as they are shipped and sold pretty quickly. Which is to say, it would be taxed when it was brewed. “Eventually they were able to do say the names in English, and started to get used to the job.”Īlcohol in Japan back in those days was taxed based upon the Brewing Tax. “Just remembering the names of the machines took them a few days,” he writes. He next had to teach essentially every aspect of whisky making to the dozens of newly hired staff, which he brought in from Hiroshima’s sake breweries. ![]() Taketsuru couldn’t rest at the newly built Yamazaki Distillery. Of course, things don’t always go as planned! Click here to read previous entries in this series. Based primarily on his serialized autobiography originally published in Nikkei in 1968, in Part Seven Taketsuru gets to work making whisky at the Yamazaki Distillery. 2018 marks a century since the founder of Nikka Whisky, Masataka Taketsuru, set out on a journey that would alter the history of Japanese whisky.
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