Founded in 2016 Nagahama is the smallest whisky distillery in Japan. A 2016 trip to Scotland by the Nagahama Brewery team would see them visit Eden Mill distillery – a single site brewery and distillery, it struck a chord with the team from Nagahama. A visit to one of Scotland’s smallest distilleries, Strathearn, also helped cement the team’s confidence that they could operate a whisky distillery as well.

Combining the influence of Eden Mill’s operations as a single site brewery and distillery (considering that up until the fermentation phase, the process for making beers and whiskies are mostly similar), and Strathearn’s unconventional use of tiny Hoga pot stills, fitted with alembic heads typically used for making other types of spirits such as Calvados or Cognac, the Nagahama team took just seven months to get their whisky production up.

The first order of business was to get the necessary pot stills ordered. Rather than wait four years for a still from Forsyth’s (the gold standard of distillation pot stills), Nagahama went with the same stills used by both Strathearn and Eden Mill – the Hoga stills from Portugal. These were designed to be fitted with a larger head for better reflux and a clean spirit. To be precise, a single distillation run results in about 100 liters or new make at roughly 68% ABV, which is then watered to 59% ABV before being filled into ex-Bourbon barrels.

Once the stills arrived, it was fitted into a small room behind the bar counter, separated by a glass wall that allows visitors to the restaurant to check out the whisky making process. Mashing and fermentation is done with the same equipment used for beermaking (located on the second floor), after which a hose transports the wash into the stills on the first floor for distillation.

By the November of 2016, it was ready. When Nagahama Distillery had announced to the public their new whisky making capabilities, it had certainly caught the public by surprise, as up till that point, there was no mention of the exciting endeavor. The first distillation subsequently took place mid of November 2016.

To prepare for their whisky making ambitions, the team at Nagahama Distillery, helmed by Takashi Kiyoi, the man who had first conceived the idea of travelling to Scotland to visit Eden Mill and Strathearn distilleries, first started off by sharpening their blending techniques, while they waited for their whiskies to be ready. The result of which is a series of blended whiskies (some of which are world blends) named Amahagan (“Nagahama” spelt backwards).