Nine Leaves

Nine Leaves is a microdistillery located in Shiga Prefecture, not far from Kyoto in Japan. Its founder, Yoshiharu Takeuchi, identified a shore of Lake Biwa in 2013 as the ideal location for the start of this adventure. The reason lies in the fact that the water of the lake is highly mineralised, in fact it lies on magmatic stones and on an old anorthite quarry, a limestone rock in which that area of ​​the country is rich.

As a lover of malt whisky, Takeuchi tried to follow the artisanal production process of the latter in the creation of his rum, getting help from a well-known Scottish house in choosing the still and learning the distillation techniques of the famous Chichibu distillery for Ichiro's malts. In his distillery there are two stills and two distillation phases. Having found water, Takeuchi looked for sugar cane. He met her on the island of Okinawa, where this represents the second economic source after tourism.

Here Nine Leaves buys the Muscovado (Kokotou in Japanese, literally black sugar) which it uses as raw material. After the fermentation of the Muscovado sugar diluted in water, everything is distilled for the first time in a robust discontinuous copper still, with a large corcubite and a large dephlegmator, where the heart and tails are extracted. The second distillation is instead done in a second copper still, with the tallest and finest dephlegmator and swan neck. This is where the cutting of the tails and the definition of the aromatic profile takes place. At the end of the process, water is added to bring the alcohol concentration to 50% abv and finally the rum is bottled, labeled and numbered by Takeuchi himself. Where aged, the distillate rests in French or American oak barrels, although Yoshiharu is experimenting with aging in barrels that have contained fine French and Italian wines.