A second round of canned cocktails from Japan’s oldest malt whisky distillery.

Japan has had canned cocktails for many years, but for a lot of their early history they weren’t exactly considered high-class drinks. With their ingredient lists often containing lots of artificial flavorings and cheap varieties of booze, canned cocktails were a cost-effective and not-non-tasty way to get your buzz on, but not necessarily all that representative of cocktail culture.

There are still plenty of canned cocktails that fit that description, but there are exceptions too, and an especially appealing one is on the way from Suntory, one of Japan’s top whisky makers, who’s putting one of their top spirits into the beverage with the Suntory Premium Highball Yamazaki, pictured above.

As the name implies, this is a canned highball using Suntory’s prized single malt Yamazaki whisky, which is produced at the company’s Yamazaki distillery in Osaka Prefecture. Opened in 1923, the Yamazaki distillery was Japan’s very first malt whisky distillery, and Suntory says Yamazaki whisky’s deep flavor is ideally suited for highballs.

This is actually Suntory’s second time to offer canned Yamazaki highballs, with the first batch having been released last year to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary of whisky-making, seen in this photo from our taste-testing session.

However, the 2023 version touted its use of Quercus (English) oak, with the beverage carrying the subtitle of “The Lingering Memory of Quercus Oak.” For the new version, Suntory is boasting about the flavor enhancements that come from the use of Spanish oak barrels, and the drink’s full official name is now Suntory Premium Highball Yamazaki-Bright and Rich Flavor, suggesting that it’s more than a straight re-release of the 2023 drink.

With an alcohol content of 9 percent and a price of 600 yen (US$4.30), the Suntory Premium Highball Yamazaki-Bright and Rich Flavor is both stronger and more expensive than the average canned cocktail in Japan, but considering how much we enjoyed last year’s Lingering Memory of Quercus Oak (and how expensive Yamazaki whisky itself is), we’re not complaining. The new Yamazaki canned highballs go on sale December 24 in limited quantities, so we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that Santa leaves one in our stocking.

Source, top image: PR Times
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