China's Gisbelle Distillery Looks to Create Whisky With Local Terroir

China is not a nation of whisky drinkers. Its most popular spirit, by far, is baiju, which is also the largest spirits category in the world, consumed almost nowhere else. Whisky, in Chinese culture, is an afterthought at best. But as has been witnessed in other societies, young Chinese are increasingly turning against the drink of their parents and grandparents, moving away from baijiu and toward other things.

For a small but growing group of distilleries, the hope is that one of those “other things” will be whisky. One whisky maker is Yantai Gisbelle Distillery, which was founded as mainland China’s first modern whisky distiller in 2011. Located on the north side of the Jiaodong Peninsula in Shandong province, about 450 miles southeast of Beijing, Gisbelle began life as a brandy maker, added craft beer within a year, before bottling China’s first single malt whisky in 2015.

Gisbelle’s scale encompasses numerous buildings and warehouses occupying an entire industrial block, just a few miles inland from the Jiaodong coast. While the brewery side does consume a good percentage of that space, a greater amount is reserved for warehouses that are rapidly being filled with barrels of Gisbelle distillate.

The reasoning behind this aggressive growth strategy is that the whisky market in China, currently valued at U.S.$1 billion (over 80% of it imported), is growing as both beer and baiju have been declining for some time. Right now, about a dozen whisky makers including Gisbelle are vying for a foothold, with another 28 or so whisky distillery projects in the works.

Gisbelle uses imported Australian barley malt and a proprietary yeast to make both single malt and blended whiskies under its own name and its Symbol label. Most popular in its homeland are its single malts, currently including a sherry cask finished, peated, and a 10 year old. A key component is water from the Kunyu mountain range with its high minerality. Aging is done exclusively in casks custom made from Mongolian oak and conditioned for 18 months with Gisbelle’s apple cider.

Key to Gisbelle’s style is not to replicate scotch, but rather to focus on local terroir to make Chinese whisky. The distillery combines an extended minimum 128-hour fermentation with a triple pot still distillation process, resulting in only a 30% “heart” cut.

Anyone familiar with the flavor profile of baijiu will recognize the Chinese character in Gisbelle. While it tastes nothing like baiju, there is a savory, almost barbecue quality to both the Symbol Konzen single malt and the Gisbelle Kozen 10 year old that calls to mind baijiu of the mostly sorghum-based, “light aroma” variety common to the Chinese north and Taiwan.

While the export market for Chinese whisky is presently minute and highly specialized, Gisbelle has thus far made inroads in parts of Europe and Canada. Plans for sales in the U.S. are underway, but with no set time frame as yet.