Kanagawa prefecture’s Koganei Shuzo is now making a craft gin fairly nearby Tokyo, with a focus on Kanagawa botanicals.  They’ve named it “Koganei,” and they are aiming for a good variety of fruit, herbs, spices, and woody notes, with most of the botanicals sourced from […]

Mitsubishi Pencil’s uni Jetstream series of pens is adored worldwide. The purported “answer to every negative stereotype you ever had about ballpoint pens,” the uni Jetstream is also wirecutter.com’s Best Pen for 2018. Now the worlds of wonderful penning and whisky are colliding, as uni […]

The Kinmon Akita Sake Brewery has revealed some aged sakes due out on December 17th that supposedly have a whisky finish. This, combined with the long maturation of 10 to 30 years — ultra long for sake — should bring about some rather unique flavors. […]

Nikkei reports that Okayama’s Tenmaya department store is teaming up with the Okayama Distillery to do a single-cask whisky release over the course of the next decade. Tenmaya will celebrate their 200th anniversary in 2029. The plan is for the Okayama Distillery to release 100 […]

Spell Nagahama backwards and you get Amahagan, the name Nagahama Distillery has chosen for their experiments with blending. We know that they’ve been fiddling around quite a bit with their peat levels at Japan’s smallest whisky distillery, so it looks like they’ve begun trying their […]

Umeshu is often mistranslated as “plum wine.” Plum liquor is a more accurate term. It’s made by letting plums steep inside of a neutral spirit such as korui (multi-distilled) shochu. As there isn’t any actual fermentation or distillation going on when making the umeshu itself, […]

There’s a new Japanese craft gin out since last Friday, dubbed “The Inland Sea Setouchi.” It brings together botanicals from across the various prefectures that surround the renowned Seto Inland Sea. The new gin appears to be some sort of collaboration that involving three separate players in […]

Publisher Shogakukan has announced the release of the ninth entry in “The Ghost Series” of Japanese whisky bottlings: Akashi 2015. The Ghost Series of rare Japanese whiskies was launched by Japanese whisky expert Stefan van Eycken, who is also the editor of nonjatta.com and author of Whisky […]

Nikka’s latest release for the European market is a whisky called Nikka Days, and it’s now available from French whisky powerhouse Le Maison du Whisky. Given that Nikka Days is not available in Japan, it occupies a space similar to that of Suntory’s Toki. Nikka […]

Volume 5 of the Le Papillon Single Cask Japanese Whisky series from Mars Whisky has now been released: P.maacki, common name alpine black swallowtail. Looking at the whisky, we can see it’s slightly over 4 years old, spending its days in Shinshu in American White […]