This Father's Day, Don't Mess Around — Get Dad Some Japanese Whisky

For several months, I was a regular blogger for dekanta (yes, the d is supposed to be lowercase, and there’s supposed to be a line over the second a, which doesn’t seem to be an option on my computer), a purveyor of high-end and generally impossible-to-find Japanese whiskies. 2018-19 was a particularly weird time for the Japanese whisky industry in general. An unexpected international boom in the category had led a whole lot of brands to essentially run out of aged whisky, to the extent that they simply stopped bottling the stuff. Prices went through the roof and distilleries tried everything they could to meet demand, from creating no-age-statement blends to importing whiskies from Scotland and Canada, blending them in Japan with homegrown whisky, and calling the resulting blends “world whiskies.” I just couldn’t get excited about the new stuff, and I didn’t really have access to the old stuff.

I was never fired, and I never quit. I simply stopped submitting pieces, and dekanta never bothered to ask where I’d gone, and one day I realized it had been six months since I’d written anything for them. I didn’t have anything particularly profound to say about Japanese whisky, and there were no new brands that had really knocked my socks off, so I stayed silent. And now it’s been two years since my last dekanta blog. This was the penultimate piece I wrote for them, and fortunately it’s not outdated — dekanta still has everything I mentioned in stock. And Father’s Day is fast approaching, so click the link and get to shopping, pronto.

I’ve gotten into a couple of exciting Japanese brands since the blog was published, namely Hatozaki and the Iwai line from the Mars Shinshu distillery. Both are worth checking out. As is my blog, in my humble opinion. Have a look!