The Chinese whisky industry is still in its infancy. However, with demand for whisky in general rising in China (x3 in ten years), their own production is also surfing this wave. Will consumers switch from the immensely popular Baijiu to Chinese single malts?In 2019 Pernod Ricard started The Chuan distillery and in 2021 Diageo announced its plans for the Eryuan distillery. Both are large scale projects that will probably boost the category of Chinese whisky. It will probably also set higher standards, as Chinese regulations for what is called ‘whisky’ are not exactly strict. Today we look at the relatively small Dongwei distillery, which started production in summer 2020 (although a micro distillery had already been running since 2014). The owner, Weidong “Ricky” Wei, personally designed and hand-crafted their pair of copper stills. While being a ‘native’ project, Dongwei whisky single casks already seems to use much higher standards by only releasing whisky after at least six years of maturartion. They use Chinese grown barley (mostly 6-row from Northwest China, now also other types from Hunan) with direct gas-fired distillation and a variety of yeast and oak combinations. They even use Mongolian oak and they’re trying to find a truly Chinese identity with certain oak types as well. I got seven cask samples from 2014, 2016 and 2017, but sadly not a lot of info. Images of actual bottles are hard to find, often inaccessible to European visitors. Dongwei whisky single casks most of information comes from their mobile website, which seems to be easier to use than their desktop version.