By now the story, or at least its result, is well-known in the whiskey world.
The Hanyu Distillery closed in 2000 due to financial difficulties and a lack of interest in Japanese whisky. But, before it did, Ichiro Akuto, the grandson of Hanyu’s original founder, was able to rescue 400 barrels of well-aged stock.
Now he just needed a clever way to sell it, thinking it should be something with a label design that would look interesting on the back wall at a bar.
The Ichiro’s Malt Card Series, as it was called, would be a collection of single cask releases, each with a label depicting one of the playing cards in a standard deck. Between 2005 and 2014, there would be 54 releases — the standard 52 cards plus two jokers — that would quickly reach legendary status among whiskey collectors.
In 2020 a full bottle collection sold for $1.52 million at Bonhams’s Fine & Rare Wine and Whisky auction in Hong Kong. Today, single bottles go for upwards of $50,000 a piece.
“That guy, [Ichiro], I think, was a real student of the marketing game,” says Joel LeVangia, the owner and general manager of Tenmile Distillery in Wassaic, N.Y. “And he gave me a really stupid idea.”
A Revolutionary Idea
You see, LeVangia had a similar quandary to what Akuto had two decades ago; he needed a clever idea to get people to drink more of his whiskey, American single malt distilled from locally sourced New York State barley.
His initial thought was to make a special bottling for every single county in New York State, all 62 of them, from Manhattan and the Bronx all the way up to Essex and St. Lawrence Counties and everything in between.
“But who’s going to collect a f*cking Herkimer County bottle?” LeVangia jokes.
It was already 2024 and it occurred to him that America’s Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) would be coming up in 2026. Born in 1975, LeVangia still remembered his youth and what he calls the “afterglow” from 1976’s Bicentennial. He suspected there would be some hoopla for this anniversary as well and he thought he could maybe capitalize on it.
So he started reading about the Revolutionary War, quickly becoming fascinated by all these cool stories none of us learned in school.
“The Battle of Stony Point was led by this general, ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne,” explains LeVangia. “Years later, when DC Comics is creating a backstory for its hero from Gotham City, they’re like, he lives in Wayne Manor, which is the ancestral home of the Wayne family, descendants of Anthony Wayne, Revolutionary War hero. Are you joking me?! I didn’t know that.”
“That guy, [Ichiro], I think, was a real student of the marketing game. And he gave me a really stupid idea.”
There are tons of stories like that, LeVangia learned, and with the Revolutionary Series he thought he could create a collectible whiskey canvas for telling them all.
A Chain of Bottlings
Tenmile quietly released the first bottle in the series, dubbed Revolutionary Whisky: The Chain That Saved America, in the fall of 2024. It references a massive iron barrier that was stretched across the Hudson River at West Point by the Continental Army between 1776 and 1778. The whiskey is quite tasty, with rich maple syrup notes balanced by a wisp of smoke and some spice.
In 2025, Tenmile released four additional bottlings: Battle of Brooklyn, Battle of White Plains, Battle of Groton Heights, and Battle of Stony Point, with that image of “Mad Anthony” Wayne on the label of the blend of ex-Pinot Noir and ex-bourbon barrel-aged American single malt. Interest has slowly been building with several of the aforementioned already sold out.
Unlike the single casks of the Malt Card Series, each Revolutionary release is a blend of three to four barrels, creating 600 to 1,500 bottles per “battle.” Right now, Tenmile’s oldest liquid is in the five-to-six-year range. By the time this project is done, there will be at least 8-year-old liquid available. If this project starts to pick up steam, LeVangia thinks it is those later bottles that might be discovered first.
“But I also feel really comfortable having these current releases as our coming-out party,” he says. “Because the whiskey is really good.”
The project will really begin to amp up in 2026.
Starting in January, Tenmile will release a new Revolutionary War battle bottling for every month of the year. January will be the Raid on Richmond, March will be the Battle of Quebec, in July it’ll be the Siege of Fort Ticonderoga and October will offer the Battle of Saratoga.
Individual bottles are $85 apiece at the moment, but you can pre-order all of 2026’s dozen for $675. That gets it down to $56 per bottle, plus the set comes with a special gifting tube that includes glassware and a symbolic “Great Chain” keychain.
So far they’ve sold 50 sets.
Ace in the Hole
So will this gimmick actually work?
Will Tenmile’s Revolutionary Series be discussed, a decade from now, as the American version of Ichiro’s Malt Card Series?
Will a full series, which will eventually run to 57 bottles, likewise sell at auction for millions?
Probably not. We’re simply in a different era of whiskey collecting from 2005. But that doesn’t mean this insanely ambitious project isn’t generating strong interest and elevating the Tenmile name.
“Part of the reason we’re doing 12 [bottles] next year is because there are a couple of guys who’ve asked me, ‘Hey, can I just buy all of them now?’” says LeVangia. “I’m like, I don’t want to tell you how much money that will be.”
The answer will end up being about $3,000 for 57 bottles released over the next couple of years. Not terrible, all things considered, especially if the collection starts gaining steam, which it seems to be.
“But I also feel really comfortable having these current releases as our coming-out party. Because the whiskey is really good.”
Specific bottles have already begun to garner interest in key Revolutionary War cities; not just Boston and Philadelphia, but smaller spots like Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Ridgefield, Conn., where the historic Keeler Tavern still has a Revolutionary-era cannonball lodged into its foundation. Tenmile’s Battle of Ridgefield bottling just so happens to come out next summer. The bar has already committed to 60 bottles; it will soon be sold out before it’s even been released.
“Eventually, I believe, people will go looking for back issues in the series, and see they’re all sold out,” says LeVangia. “‘Oh, but there’s one on the internet for 300 bucks. You know what? I got to have it.’ And they buy it. And then other people are like, ‘People are paying $300 for a $60 bottle of whiskey?! Is this stuff good?’ That’s what I hope happens.”
