Nikka Coffey Vodka (700 ml)

When Masataka Taketsuru installed two Coffey continuous stills — built by Blairs Ltd. of Glasgow and originally operated at Nikka's Nishinomiya plant — at Miyagikyo, he was preserving a 19th-century Scottish distillation technology inside a Japanese whisky house. The Coffey Vodka is the clearest expression of what those stills do to a corn-dominant grain bill when the objective is spirit, not whisky.

Miyagikyo sits in a forested valley west of Sendai, fed by water from the Zao Mountain Range — among the softest, lowest-hardness water sources of any Japanese distillery. That mineral-lean water, combined with the Coffey still's gentle continuous distillation, strips away harsh congeners while retaining the grain's inherent sweetness and a faint cereal creaminess that column-distilled neutral spirits rarely preserve.

Distilled in a Coffey continuous still on a corn-dominant grain bill, the spirit is produced at Miyagikyo rather than a dedicated neutral-spirit facility — an architectural decision that gives it a flavour identity no conventional vodka distillery replicates. Bottling details and filtration specifics are not publicly disclosed by Nikka, but the house's grain distillation philosophy prioritises texture retention over absolute neutrality.

What is categorically unusual: this is a vodka produced inside a whisky distillery on stills designed for grain whisky, making the boundary between categories deliberately porous. Drink now; no aging upside applies.