The family name of the founder of Nikka, Taketsuru, 竹鶴, is composed of the Chinese characters for “bamboo crane”. These are also the same characters that appear on many Nikka products, such as the Taketsuru 17 and 21. I remember highballing the whole under […]

Mars, perhaps the third largest whisky distiller in Japan, has its history in Kagoshima as a Japanese shochu maker, Hombo Shuzo (shuzo = sake brewery/shochu distillery). Hombo Shuzo essentially restarted whisky-making operations in Nagano with the Shinshu distillery. To help restart, their pot stills from […]

The latest out of Kagoshima’s Kanosuke Distillery is their new born, named simply “Kanosuke New Born.” Distilled earlier this year, it’s been aged for eight months in American white oak ex-shochu casks. Specifically, those casks that used to contain Komasa Syuzo’s Mellow Kozuru brand of […]

The Kyoto Distillery surprised us this past weekend with the sudden release of Ki No Bi “Edition K.” Currently only available at Amazon JP, Edition K brings Ki No Bi into the cask-aged gin realm once again. I say once again since we’ve already seen […]

Releases like this White Oak Akashi Sake Cask make me feel warm and fuzzy about the future of Japanese whisky. And that’s not just because it’s 50% abv! Japanese Whisky Shortage for a few years I mean, sure — we are in the midst of […]

On October 1, Mars Whisky released the Single Malt Komagatake Limited Edition 2018. Suntory may have failed to release the Yamazaki Limited Edition 2018, so here’s Mars Whisky to wear those pants instead. Limited to 10,000 bottles, it’s at 48% abv. This new Limited Edition […]

Someone called this latest release in Mars Whisky’s Lucky Cat series, “May”, a stealth release. I couldn’t agree more. As of this writing, it’s still not on Hombo Shuzo’s homepage, despite going on sale already. And the whole “going on sale” part was the only […]

Two guest reviews by David Tsujimoto of Aloha Whisky in one week! This time he’s back with his review of the new Yoichi and Miyagikyo Manzanilla Wood Finish releases, direct from Nikka’s Miyagikyo Distillery near Sendai. As we learned last week, Nikka Whisky is repeating […]

The first guest contribution to nomunication.jp comes from David Tsujimoto of Aloha Whisky (FB/IG), who managed to snag one of the new Ichiro’s Malt Chibidaru 2018 bottles from Mitsukoshi/Isetan. Only 140 bottles were made available at 27,000 yen apiece. They’ve since gone up to 64,800 yen […]

Chugoku Jozo’s Sakurao Distillery has been on point this year. Their first gin releases were good. Really good — read my review here. So good, in fact, that the Sakurao Gin Original took home the Best of Gin award at this year’s Los Angeles International […]