Inside Ki No Bi: Where Kyoto Botanicals Meet a London Dry Tradition

For most of the twentieth century, Japan didn’t really make gin. Suntory and Nikka built their reputations on whisky, and the Japanese spirits industry as a whole oriented itself around shōchū, sake, and increasingly polished single malts. Gin, when it appeared, was an afterthought - either imported or made under licence with little distinction.

Ki No Bi changed that. Launched in 2016 from a small distillery in southern Kyoto, it was the first gin to be conceived, distilled, and bottled with explicitly Japanese sensibilities applied to a London Dry framework. Nearly a decade later, it remains the gin that defined what “Japanese gin” actually means as a category, and The Kyoto Distillery itself has become the reference point for the broader Japanese craft gin movement.

This is the story of the distillery, the production approach, the expressions worth knowing, and the wider scene Ki No Bi helped create.

The distillery

The Kyoto Distillery sits in Minami-ku, in the south of the city, in a building that looks more like a small tea house than a spirits facility. The operation was founded in 2014 by David Croll and Marcin Miller, two non-Japanese spirits industry figures who had spent years working in Japanese spirits and identified the absence of a serious Japanese gin as an opportunity worth pursuing. Construction took two years; the first bottle was released in October 2016.

The scale is genuinely small relative to the major Japanese spirits houses. Where Suntory’s Yamazaki distillery produces millions of bottles of whisky per year across an industrial-scale facility, The Kyoto Distillery is closer in size to a small craft distillery anywhere in the world. The team is correspondingly small, and the production approach is hands-on rather than highly automated.

The water source matters here. The distillery uses water from Fushimi, the same source that supplies most of Kyoto’s traditional sake brewers. Fushimi water is naturally soft, with a mineral profile that produces a particularly clean spirit base. This is part of why Japanese gin in general - and Ki No Bi specifically - tends to feel lighter and more crystalline than its British counterparts. The water itself contributes to the spirit’s character.

The botanical philosophy

The defining feature of Ki No Bi’s production is what the distillery calls a six-category approach. Rather than distilling all botanicals together in a single pass (the standard approach for almost every other gin), Ki No Bi divides its botanicals into six groups and distils each group separately. The six distillates are then blended in specific proportions to produce the final spirit.

The six categories, according to the distillery’s own materials:

• Base - juniper, orris, hinoki cypress
• Citrus - yuzu peel sourced from northern Kyoto
• Tea - gyokuro green tea from Uji, the tea-growing region southeast of Kyoto
• Herbal - sansho pepper and lemon verbena
• Spice - ginger and kinome (the young leaves of the sansho plant)
• Floral - red shiso and bamboo

The reasoning behind the six-category approach: different botanicals release their flavour compounds at different rates and temperatures during distillation. By distilling them in groups designed around similar chemistry, each component is captured at its optimal extraction profile. The blending stage then produces a spirit where each note sits in its intended balance.

In practice, this means Ki No Bi tastes like a gin where the botanicals have been considered individually rather than as a single botanical bill. The yuzu reads as yuzu rather than as generic citrus; the gyokuro provides a vegetal undertone you don’t get from gins distilled in a single pass; the sansho produces a distinctive low buzzing tingle on the tongue.

The flavour profile

The distillery describes Ki No Bi as a “Kyoto Dry Gin” - using the London Dry framework but with Japanese botanicals. Independent reviewers consistently describe similar character notes: floral and slightly grassy on the nose, with juniper sitting in a middle position rather than at the front; on the palate, juniper arrives properly with the yuzu citrus lifted and bright, the gyokuro adding vegetal depth, and the sansho producing a distinctive peppery finish that reviewers consistently single out as one of the most identifiable features.

The standard expression is bottled at 45.7% ABV, slightly above the typical 40-43% range. The elevated proof carries the botanical complexity better than a 40% bottling would.

The overall character that emerges from these descriptions: recognisably gin (juniper present, structural), but with a peripheral character that is unambiguously Japanese. It’s not a gimmick gin where one signature botanical (cucumber, rose, cherry blossom) defines the profile; it’s a gin where many botanicals work in conversation, with the Japanese ingredients providing the distinctive note.

The expressions worth knowing

Ki No Bi (45.7% ABV) is the standard expression and the bottle most people will encounter. It’s the everyday Kyoto Dry Gin and the bottle that defined the brand. The reference point against which everything else is judged.

Ki No Bi Sei (54.5% ABV) is the navy strength expression, with a nod to British naval tradition. The higher ABV pushes the sansho pepper and ginger forward and makes the spirit considerably more assertive. The standard recommendation from reviewers is to use it in Negronis and other spirit-forward cocktails where the higher proof can stand up to assertive modifiers.

Ki No Tea is the limited annual release that leans heavily into the gyokuro and tencha (green tea). Less juniper, more vegetal, more obviously tea-forward. It’s an interesting bottle but not the place to start - it makes more sense after you’ve tasted the standard Ki No Bi and want to explore where the tea component leads.

Other limited releases appear periodically (Ki No Bi Karasu, Ki No Toh, single botanical experiments) but the three above represent the core line.

How Ki No Bi fits in the wider Japanese gin scene

Since Ki No Bi launched, the Japanese gin category has expanded considerably. The bottles worth knowing in the wider scene:

Roku Gin (Beam Suntory) is the volume player. Made in a much larger industrial operation than The Kyoto Distillery, Roku uses six Japanese botanicals (cherry blossom, cherry leaf, yuzu peel, sencha tea, gyokuro tea, sansho pepper) plus the standard gin botanicals. The result is a softer, more accessible Japanese gin than Ki No Bi, designed for broader distribution. Worth trying but less distinctive.

Nikka Coffey Gin is distilled through column stills (Nikka’s Coffey stills, originally built for grain whisky). The column distillation produces a softer, lighter spirit than Ki No Bi’s pot still approach. Citrus-forward with yuzu, kabosu, amanatsu, and shikuwasa among its botanicals.

Etsu Gin comes from Hokkaido (Asahikawa Distillery) and leans into Akita citrus. Less widely distributed internationally than Ki No Bi or Roku.

135 East Hyogo Dry Gin is a newer entrant from Kaikyō Distillery, with a different botanical approach (sansho, yuzu, sencha tea, akamatsu pine).

The pattern across these bottles: Japanese gin as a category has matured into something genuinely diverse, with different distilleries pursuing different visions of what “Japanese gin” can mean. Ki No Bi remains the reference point not because it’s the only worthwhile bottle but because it set the template against which the others are working.

Where Ki No Bi fits at home

In a Martini, the standard recommendation is a 5:1 gin-to-vermouth ratio with a yuzu peel rather than lemon if you can find one. The yuzu in the gin pairs with the additional yuzu garnish to produce a martini with an unmistakably Japanese character.

In a Gin and Tonic, a clean tonic (Fever-Tree Mediterranean is the consistent recommendation in reviews) and a single strip of lemon or yuzu peel works better than the heavy garnish approach often seen with contemporary gins. Ki No Bi has enough character to carry the drink without help.

In a Negroni, the standard Ki No Bi is decent but the Ki No Bi Sei is meaningfully better. The higher ABV of the Sei stands up to Campari and the additional sansho character adds depth.

For neat sipping, the standard Ki No Bi rewards slow drinking at room temperature. The 45.7% ABV is high enough to be assertive but not so high as to be uncomfortable.

Pricing and where to buy

Ki No Bi is widely available in the UK and Europe through major spirits retailers; less widely in the US. Pricing typically runs £55-65 in the UK for the standard expression, with the Sei meaningfully more expensive (£75-90) and Ki No Tea allocated and priced higher when available.

Master of Malt carries Ki No Bi reliably with international shipping. The Whisky Exchange stocks it occasionally and is the better source for the Sei expression.

In Japan, the distillery itself runs a shop in Kyoto that’s worth visiting if you’re in the city - both for the full range of expressions and for distillery-exclusive bottlings that don’t reach the international market.

The honest summary

Ki No Bi is the gin that defined a category. It’s not the cheapest Japanese gin, it’s not the most widely distributed, and it’s not the only one worth tasting. But it’s the one that established what Japanese gin could be, and ten years on it remains the reference point.

For drinkers who want to understand the Japanese gin category, Ki No Bi is the starting bottle. For drinkers who already know they like Japanese gin and want a versatile bottle for cocktails, it remains a good choice but no longer a necessary one - Roku and the newer entrants offer comparable quality at lower prices, depending on what you want from the spirit.

What Ki No Bi has that the others don’t is the six-category production approach, the small-scale distillery character, and the consistency that comes from a decade of refinement on the same recipe. Those things are worth the price premium if they matter to you.