Kirin gives us a clue on how to get a bottle of its skyrocketing-price whisky for cheap

Online prices for the soon-disappearing Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 doubled in a day, but there’s still hope for those with shallow pockets.

Thanks to the magic of deep-frying and salt, it’s pretty easy to find food that’s both delicious and cheap (it’s not until you throw “healthy” into your list of requirements that candidates get hard to find). Things tend to be a little different in the world of alcoholic beverages, though, where less expensive materials and production processes have a more consistently negative effect on the final flavor.

Kirin’s Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50, though, is an exception. Distilled near Mt. Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture, the blended whisky has won awards for its taste, yet sells for only around 1,500 yen (US$13) a bottle…or, at least, it used to sell for around 1,500 yen a bottle.

On Thursday, Kirin gave word that demand for Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 is far outstripping supply, and that due to a lack of materials, it’ll be retiring the product come spring. Online prices for bottles immediately shot up, and before even a day had passed, the situation looked like this.

On Mericari, one of Japan’s most popular auction sites, sellers are asking for at least 3,000 yen a bottle, roughly double the going price for Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 before Kirin announced the moratorium. Things aren’t any cheaper over on Yahoo! Japan Auctions, where we came across numerous multi-bottle sets, with 12-bottle bundles priced in the at 36,000-40,000 yen range.

Oh, and those 1,500-yen bottles on Amazon Japan we told you about the other day? They’re all sold out.

However, there is still a way to get your hands on Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 without paying a significant markup. Being as thirsty and cheap as we always are, we contacted Kirin to ask when its final shipment of the whisky will be going out. While the representative couldn’t provide us with an exact date, he did confirm that the company hasn’t run out of Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 just yet, telling us:

“Currently, we are planning our last shipment to suppliers for late February or early March. Until then, we will be shipping Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 in the same quantities as we always have.”

Kirin itself doesn’t appear to be planning to increase the price of Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 in its final days, and while individual online sellers will always price their wares as high as the market will allow, brick-and-mortar supermarkets in Japan tend to price their products close to the manufacturer’s suggested price. With a few months left before Fuji-sanroku Tarajuku Genshu 50 is gone for good, you’ve still got a chance of picking up a normally priced bottle when chain retailers get their next shipment in, as long as you can make it to the store before they sell out.

Sources: Mercari, Yahoo! Japan Auctions
Top image: Amazon Japan/富士山麓
Insert images: Mercari, Yahoo! Japan Auctions

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