Suntory Toki Black: Peated Hakushu, and a Whisky Built for Listening Bars

We already pour Suntory Toki and Yamazaki 12 in our highballs. Toki Black is the same house going somewhere darker.

What Changed

Standard Toki is a blend built for the highball. Clean, light, and designed so that soda water improves it rather than washing it out. It works because nothing in it is loud.

Toki Black keeps that framework and adds two things: Hakushu Peated whisky and Hakushu grain whisky.

Hakushu is Suntory's forest distillery in the Southern Japanese Alps, and it is the peated one in the family. Yamazaki does sherry and mizunara. Hakushu does green, herbal, faintly smoky. Adding its peated malt to a blend designed for lightness is a specific decision: the smoke is meant to sit under everything rather than lead.

It is bottled at 43% ABV. Suntory positions it as Toki's first limited edition, and their first limited edition release in about a decade.

The Listening Bar Framing

Suntory describes the whisky as evoking the atmosphere of vinyl listening bars, and the launch came with a music collaboration between the American producer Terrace Martin and the Japanese jazz artist Ryota Nozaki, who records as Jazztronik.

That reference is worth unpacking for anyone who has not been to one. A jazz kissa, or listening bar, is a Japanese format that goes back to the postwar decades: a small room, a serious sound system, a large record collection, and a social contract that you are there to listen rather than talk. Some of them still enforce quiet.

The link to whisky is not decorative. Those bars were where a lot of Japanese people first drank whisky seriously, slowly, one glass over a full album side. Building a slightly smokier, slightly richer Toki and pointing it at that setting is a reasonably honest piece of positioning.

What It Tastes Like

Suntory's notes: baked apple, oregano and honeysuckle on the nose. Then butterscotch sweetness balanced by clove, cinnamon and toasted rosemary. It finishes on white pepper, ginger and a gentle smokiness.

The herbal notes are the Hakushu signature. Oregano and rosemary are unusual descriptors for whisky and they are the giveaway that this is Hakushu material rather than Yamazaki.

How to Drink It

Highball, and Suntory would say the same. This is a house that has spent decades arguing that whisky and soda is not a compromise.

The method Suntory teaches: chill the glass, fill it completely with hard ice, pour the whisky, stir to chill it further, add cold soda down the side, and stir once, gently, so you keep the carbonation.

Neat also works, and is the better way to find the smoke, which is subtle enough that soda can hide it.

Pair It With

Grilled and charred food, and anything with a little fat. Yakitori, grilled fish, karaage.

Try It at Juraku

Suntory Toki Black is on the whisky list at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side, alongside Toki and Yamazaki 12. It is a limited edition, so check the current menu or ask the bar what is open.