• Julia Thiel
  • The biggest flask at WhiskyFest Chicago (possibly the only one)

Calling WhiskyFest overwhelming is almost an understatement. There are 80-plus booths, most of them offering four or more whiskies, which adds up to more alcohol than you could drink in a week, much less a few hours (the official website advertises more than 300 whiskies, but I’d estimate it’s closer to 400). The event is so popular that tickets sold out in seven hours this year—considerably less than the seven days they took to sell out last year.

  • Julia Thiel
  • Suntory whiskies

I’ve been hearing a lot about Japanese whisky in the last year or so, and noticed while flipping through the WhiskyFest program ahead of time that there would be two Japanese companies there: Suntory and Nikka. Not coincidentally, those are also the only two companies that sell Japanese whisky in the U.S.—and Nikka has been available here for less than two years. Japan has had commercial whisky distilleries since the 1920s, but all of a sudden, people are paying attention. In the past several years both Suntory and Nikka whiskies have won a plethora of gold medals at the World Whiskies Awards; at the 2012 awards Suntory’s Yamazaki 25-year whisky was declared the world’s best single malt, and at this year’s awards Nikka’s Taketsuru 17-year won for world’s best blended malt.

  • Julia Thiel
  • Kavalan’s Solist whiskies

Next to the Nikka booth was Kavalan, Taiwan’s first whisky distillery. It’s just been released in the U.S., though it’s not yet available in Chicago; a representative said it’ll arrive here in the next month or so. I tried the clean, fruity, slightly spicy Classic, followed by the spicier Concertmaster, which offered notes of darker fruit. The style is very different from the Scotch-inspired Japanese whiskies; I didn’t taste smokiness in any of the Kavalan whiskies, though there was plenty of fruitiness. In Kavalan’s Solist series, the same whisky is aged in different barrels, and the differences were striking. The sweet, heavy sherry cask whisky was less boozy than the bourbon cask version, which tasted practically flammable. My favorite was the Vinho Barrique (wine barrel-aged), which offered the complexity of wine and the booziness of whiskey.