REPORT Yamazaki Distillery tour on 3rd March 2018
This well known distillery is located between Kyoto and Osaka prefecture, strickty the address is in Osaka, but it is often regarded as Kyoto because it is more closed to center of Kyoto than of Osaka.
The location is good, 15minute from Kyoto station and 30 minutes from Osaka station by train, where the 1st Suntory president Mr. Torii believed a perfect place for both whisky production and for the advertisement of the distillery.
This tour is really popular and is very difficult to get the reservatiob today. This time, we joined the tour because ruckyky? the sales person from Suntory got the reservation for us!
The tour After we pass the entrance, we waited at the main building where we can study the history and also enjoy hopping of the distillery goods.
For this tour guidance, a woman staff attends us and explains the Yamazaki whisky details. For the visitors from overseas they offer the Audio with English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean… etc.
The tour started the introduction of how the whisksy is made, this is very common story but they intoduce the feature of Yamazaki as well , like the place has fog which proves the land high humidity and it accerates the speed of whisky maturation.
Then the first place we visited is Mashing & Fermentation place.
Then we moved to the place of distillation where 12 large whisky potstill are in a room. Because of these potstills the temperature inside is really high.
The third place we visited was really holly place for whisky fans, the warehouse of thousands of whisky barrels. As soon as we entered the warehouse building we have the strong aroma of malt. And inside the warehouse is much more colder than outside. After the introduction about some type of whisky barrels and engels shere, we could walk inside for about 10 minutes and we could take many pictures of them. We highly recommend you to take pictures, but it is dark inside, do not forget to take good quality cameras which is available in dark place! We can see different shape, different age of whisky barrels, both malt whisky barrels and grain whisky barrels. The picture is the old whisky casks distilled in 1979.
