Forgotten Japanese Whiskies of the 1980s and 90s

As distillers launched super premium brands like Yamazaki and Hibiki, they were also selling cheap oddities to young drinkers who weren’t interested.

The Japanese Whisky Family during the 1980s, when things were simpler. And uglier. Photo from w.atwiki.jp

Everyone loves Japanese whisky right now. It’s the hottest booze in the world, but Japanese whisky also experienced a huge boom in postwar Japan. During the 1960s and ’70s, whisky went from a drink of the well-to-do businessman to a drink of the average citizen, and it became common for working-class Japanese men to keep bottles at home. Production boomed.

In the early 1980s, everything changed. Japanese whisky distilleries were starting to lose customers to shōchū. Revised tax laws made imported Scotc cheap, and as drinking habits shifted, whisky lost its allure. In 1984 alone, domestic whisky consumption dropped 15.6 percent in Japan, and Suntory pursued two very different parallel strategies to regain customers. On one hand, Suntory tried to raise its profile by releasing Yamazaki 12, Japan’s first premium mass-market single malt, in 1984. The previous year, it also launched Suntory Q, the first of many brands of light, inexpensive, entry level booze that only faintly resembled whisky.

As Stefan Van Eycken writes in his excellent book Whisky Rising, these strategies are called premiumization and economization, respectively. Economization, Van Eycken writes…