Will Robb Photography

Recently I was introduced to a very nice bar called the Cask and Still in Nishi Kawaguchi in Saitama by a friend. In turn I introduced the bar to my friend, the writer Nick Coldicott and he liked it so much he had to write a piece about it for Metropolis magazine which came out this week. The bar is in a small basement just below the station. As well as having one of my favourite beers, Yona Yona ale on tap, it has one of the best selections of whisky I have ever seen.

As always, Nick’s writing is both informative and amusing. This time he managed to excel his usual high standards by actually quoting me in the original Scots dialect I use. For a whisky piece I guess it’s the right thing to do. Anyway, Nick’s article does a great job of explaining everything, but I’ll have my say as well I guess.

As normal for this kind of shoot I have to be at the bar at least an hour before the bar opens. Here in Japan most restaurants/bars/galleries don’t want any customers in the shot, so you need to arrange for them to open up early. The owner, Kawamoto san is a really nice guy and was more than happy to help out. He’s a big fan of all things Scottish (no wonder he has the best whisky bar in Saitama) and we had a good chat about my home country and whisky as I was shooting. For the main photo of the bar I had to use my 17-40mm lens at it’s widest angle to get a shot with all the whisky in it. The lighting was OK for hand held shots at a high iso, but I just went for the low iso on the tripod to bring the colours out a bit more. AS always, I used the cable release to prevent shake as I talked about in the previous post. For all the bottle shots I used my 24-70 mm f.28L lens with my 580EX speedlite to bounce light off the ceiling/wall to get the light right. You can’t flash directly onto the bottle, the glare is just too much.

We had a good few whisky’s, purely for the benefit of the article (aherm). As Nick mentioned, the 8 year old Port Charlotte, PC 8 was an exceptionally good malt, it did taste much more mature than it’s young age. It’s produced by the Bruichladdich distillery on the island of Islay, just off the west coast of Scotland. It’s a 60.5% malt, very strong, but also very smooth. There is also a PC 7, PC 6 and PC 5, all of which Kawamoto san assured us were really good. He really knows his whisky, so whatever he says I believe.

From the same distillery we had the Octomore which was brilliant. It’s very rare. It originally comes from Octomore farm on Islay, but had been out of production for 169 years, but has only recently been brought back into production by Bruichladdich and it is a limited edition malt. Not many bottles came to Japan, I’ve never seen it anywhere else and it was pure nectar. It is the worlds most heavily peated whisky and at 63.5% volume it really hits your jaw with a bunch that can wobble you for a few seconds. I found adding just a little bit of water helped bring out the tastes a bit more. Not cheap, at almost 3000 yen for a dram, but given it’s rarity it was nice to splash out and have some. Liked the black bottle as well.

Other than that we had some very nice Glen Grants, which were a favourite of the owner. Nick had tried the 15 year old on his previous trip there and recommended it, this time we tried the 5 year and the 21 year old. Both excellent again, I preferred the latter, quite a sweet after taste. There was also an Ichiro’s malt and a Tamnavulin 15 from the Scotch Malt Whisky society. Some days you just have to love work.