French whisky megastore Le Maison du Whisky has picked up an exclusive bottling of blended Mars Whisky, and they have named it “Kasei.” Kasei is of course Japanese for Mars. It’s a relatively affordable 36 euro, but limited to two bottles per customer. They describe […]

Hombo Shuzo is the latest big name to announce a distillery expansion to meet rising demand for Japanese whisky. Nikkei reports that they will be investing some 1.2bio yen in the Mars Shinshu Distillery, with construction of a new 1998 square meter distillation facility and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Just under a year since the release of The Lucky Cat Mint, Mars Whisky is back with the fourth entry in the blended whisky series: The Lucky Cat May. Distilled Blended (ed: thanks for the correction) at the Mars Shinshu Distillery, the liquid gets finished […]

We wake up this morning to find that Mars Whisky’s fourth release in the Le Papillon series is “H.glaucippe liukiuensis,” a butterfly perhaps better known by the name Great Orange Tip. The whisky however is distilled in March 2014 in Shinshu, rested in a single […]

2018 is the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The event marked the end of the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and restoration of power to the Emperor, in this case Emperor Meiji. The Meiji government would go on to rapidly modernize and […]

Hombo Shuzo’s Shinshu Distillery is breaking up some more decades-old casks for another Komagatake release. This one is the “Single Malt Komagatake Aged 27 Years.” There have been a couple other whiskies out of Shinshu with the same age statement, and they look to be […]