If you’re a fan of Yoichi, and a slew of other Nikka whiskies, you had better stock up now because it looks like they’re about to disappear for the foreseeable future. According to a “Notice of final sales” email sent out to liquor stores in Japan Nikka has decided to discontinue a large number of their whiskies due to increased demand and a decrease in supply which has given rise to products like the Taketsuru NAS which is exactly the product they’re protecting per the email.
And, by aggregating commodity items by the end sales, whiskeys and stabilization of supply, to increase the production efficiency in order to increase the production of mainstay products such as “Taketsuru” (translated via Google)
Below is a list of NIkka whiskies that have been set for “final sale” and will be discontinued later this year. Many of which seemed to also received a price increase to accompany the final sale notice per the article linked above.
- Single Malt Yoichi ’20
- Single Malt Yoichi ’15
- Single Malt Yoichi ’12
- Single Malt Yoichi ’10
- Single Malt Yoichi
- Single malt Miyagi Gorges ’15
- Single malt Miyagi Gorges ’12
- Single malt Miyagi Gorges ’10
- Single malt Miyagi Gorges
- Taketsuru Pure Malt ’21
- Taketsuru Pure Malt ’17
- Pure Malt White
- Cranes ’17
- Black Nikka Special
- Black Nikka 8 years
- All malt
- Malt Club
- Hainikka
- G & G White
- The blend
- The blend Kobe
- Nikka Whisky Hakata
Basically it looks like the increasing practice of dropping age-statements in favor of NAS has reached Japan in a big way and it’s causing a big cut in what’s going to be available. Which you can expect to see affecting the secondary market as well pretty soon. I expect before the end of the year we’ll be seeing some of the bottles listed above going for outrageous sums in auctions and online trading sites.