Greetings readers and members of CELLARR!
Pleasure to meet you, I am Chen Lim. Thank you for having me pen this inaugural English piece for Cultivator.
I am a retired academic from Singapore who finally found the time to travel the world visiting distilleries and of course drinking whiskies. Since my retirement, I have started my second life studying about whiskies. I have enjoyed them for decades but never got the chance to really carefully examine them in detail. So maybe I have not truly retired from academia after all!
In the last six months I have visited many distilleries in Japan, Australia and China, and conversed with many very talented and hardworking people, all with the single-minded goal of making the best whiskies they can. Over the next few issues of Cultivator, I hope to introduce the readers to these distilleries and share my experience of the visits, and perhaps in my limited way, convey what these wonderful whisky makers wanted to tell the world about their whiskies.
Indubitably, the whisky distilleries in Japan require no introduction to the domestic audience, but I was persuaded by Yoshihiko-san, President of TisTa (over many drinks at a basement Ginza Tokyo whisky bar) that an English language medium is needed to present the news about Japanese whisky distilleries to an international audience. This I cannot agree more, over 25 years ago when I first visited Japanese whisky distilleries in the late 1990s, there were only six major distilleries producing whiskies. Before the virus struck in 2019, I counted maybe 20+ distilleries old and new. Today in 2024, shockingly but amazingly, there are over 100 large and small, industrial and craft distilleries throughout Japan!
There are many respected and highly-qualified Japanese specialists more capable to write and discuss about Japanese whiskies than me, still I figure that perhaps it may be interesting to hear about the perspectives from an outsider – sometimes through the view of a tourist, other times as a retired anthropologist, but maybe crucially as just someone traveling the ‘spiritual’ road on a whisky pilgrimage.
On a similar vein, since I was introduced to CELLARR, I found many very informative and interesting news from the whisky industry and lamented that much of these important information are not available outside of the Japanese audience, and hence perhaps an international audience can also be cultivated. Working both ways, news about up-and-coming distilleries in Asia, Australia, Europe, Scotland and elsewhere can also be brought to the domestic readers.
Seems like a lot of work, but hey, I am retired so I have time on my hands. More essentially, I truly enjoyed getting to know the people behind CELLARR and found their belief in their mission to promote the craft and techniques of Japanese whiskies motivating. There’s an old rule-of-thumb, can you still have a whisky together after the first time? If the answer is yes, I think you have found a fellow whisky friend. Since my first meeting with Yoshihiko-san and the CELLARR team we are still drinking happily together.
I look very much forward to writing the next piece on my recent visit to a distillery in China.
Until then, Slainte!
Chen
South China Sea.
主に20代のウイスキーが大好きな若手で構成される編集部です。さまざまな蒸溜所、つくり手、ファンの方々との交流をもとに、これからのウイスキー業界を盛り上げる活動を続けていきます。Twitterも発信中。フォローは以下のアイコンをクリック！
記事のご感想やご意見など、コメントにて頂けるととても励みになります^^/
コメント