“These are very real emotional responses,” he says. “Disappointment, anger – collectors feel like this. It’s in their DNA.”

Pye is best known in the whisky world for his collection of the Hanyu Ichiro Full Card Series. This now-fabled whisky from a silent Japanese distillery has generated incredible prices at auction, stealing headlines and surprising even the biggest fans at how much it can command. The full set comprises 54 bottles of single malt with each bottle representing a card in a deck, with two jokers included – one monochrome, one colour. It’s a fun, utterly attractive and mesmerising part of Pye’s collection, and one that he loves. 

He has built a friendship too with the so-called rockstar Japanese distiller behind the Hanyu distillery, Ichiro Akuto, now founder of the Chichibu Distillery. “I was lucky to buy his Hanyu whisky when it first came out, when it was cheaper,” Pye explains. “But when the series was only halfway through they stopped selling in it in Europe. You could only buy it in Japan. So I got friends in Japan to help me complete the collection.  I flew there to collect the last two bottles – the jokers. By the time I arrived, my friends told me they had already increased ten times in price in the two weeks since release.” Pye is planning an exclusive event to give people access to the Full card series and his friend, distiller Ichiro Akuto, has promised to create a special edition if he does so, just to mark what would be a very rare occasion.  

Building a collection
But this Japanese hero is only a single strand in Pye’s story. He cast his arms wide when he made whisky his focus, gathering brands from all over the world to his collection. He has a dynamic American shelf, many bought while visiting a daughter who was studying in the US. His Irish collection got off the ground early while his Scotch thread is one of the largest and most exciting.  

Pride of place: the Hanyu Ichiro Full Card Series

He’ll laugh as he tells you how he didn’t like whisky when he tried it first, preferring wine and other spirits as a young man, enjoying life in the 1960s. His formal return to whisky didn’t come until 1991 when he gathered male friends around him and created their own whisky club. His wife seemed to have so many structured social groups and was out meeting female friends at events like book clubs and he thought, I want something like that for us. So their whisky club was born. 

Military precision
His military background put order on things, he says. They agreed to meet four times per year – the first Monday in February, the first Tuesday in May, the first Wednesday in September and the first Thursday in November. The members brought their whisky and they educated each other with informed discussions about the bottle and its story. These were not drunken sessions of whisky drinking but serious whisky education that has stood the test of time. They will have their 117th meeting this September and Pye has chaired 100 of those. There were 15 original members, some of whom of since died, and they now have 25 members, a number they plan to stick with. 

“I’m a collector as a species,” he says with good humour. “I don’t know what drives me to collect but it is something in my genes. I have to do it.” His earliest collection is his largest. As a boy he was given a scale drawing of a model aircraft and he has been collecting these ever since. “No one will be interested but I do it anyway. I have to collect, but it’s not for money. Money can be the result but that is not why a collector does it. If it’s only about money then they are an investor and you must separate these two types of people.”

Midleton Very Rare:  he is missing one bottle – the 1988 – and from what he tells me, until a collection is complete it’s never quite gone from your mind

He particularly likes definitive collections that are part of a series or a defined annual release. He enjoys consistency and finds himself drawn to the label of a bottle or the glass design. How the bottle is packaged and designed is really important to a collector, he explains. It’s a fact that put a stop to one of his most-loved  collections – the Midleton Very Rare. He bought the first bottle, 1984, on an early trip to Ireland and tried to get every bottle since. But then, in 2017, they changed the bottle design and he was so disappointed. “Even angry,” he suggests. “I totally lost interest.” He couldn’t understand why they would want to change it and so he couldn’t continue. The same thing happened with one of his Bowmore series collections. They changed the design of all of their bottles in the 1990s and so he stopped with that one too. “These are very real emotional responses,” he says. “Disappointment, anger – collectors feel like this. It’s in their DNA.” 

But then, it allows him to tell the story of how he bought the 1984 edition of Midleton VR while on his first 24-hour stopover in Ireland while working as a pilot. The series had just begun and it had  nothing but the ambition of the distillery to suggest what might be ahead for this exemplary series. He got to sign his name in a huge leather-bound ledger alongside all the others who bought that year and, on a recent visit back to Ireland, he was delighted to track that signature down in the Jameson museum and trace the whisky adventures he has had since. In the telling of this story you can hear that his love of Midleton hasn’t really disappeared, despite his feelings for the new design. Plus, he is missing one bottle – the 1988 – and from what he tells me, until a collection is complete it’s never quite gone from your mind.

Find your own journey
His advice to new collectors would be to try and find a personal journey in whisky. There is so  much noise around the industry now that it’s hard to find your own way, he says. Pick a label style you like, or a bottle shape. Something tangible that you can feel and recognise. Visit a new distillery and stick with it, talk to the staff, ask them their opinion and come back again. Make friends with people in whisky and this will pay off, he says. It doesn’t matter which region or distillery you choose, only that you do it for yourself.

A friend who had a career in finance recently told him that now, as they’re older and wiser, he realises he should have followed Pye’s example and explored the whisky world all those years ago. It would have been a much healthier payoff than the other investments he made, his friend suggests. “That made me kind of proud,” he says with a wry smile. 

Click here to visit Pye Palm’s Hanyu Ichiro Full Card Series website

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