Brewers of sake first, and distillers almost from the start.

Akashi is the whisky label of Eigashima Shuzo, a drinks maker based in the Ōkubo district of Akashi, a port city in Hyōgo Prefecture, west of Kobe. The company is a sake brewer first. Its own history says sake making in the area began in the early Edo period, and that in the Meiji era Hyokichi Urabe, a younger brother of the head of the Urabe family of brewers, ran and expanded a sake business of his own.

Eigashima Shuzo was founded in 1888. The company says it was formed by merging several sake makers in the Eigashima area, and Japanese Wikipedia gives the date as 13 May 1888. It registered the sake names Yuri Masamune in 1894 and Kamitaka in 1895, and Japanese Wikipedia describes the firm as best known as the brewer of Kamitaka.

Packaging was part of the story early on. In 1899 the company began making its own glass bottles; it says it launched the world’s first 1.8-litre glass sake bottle. Japanese Wikipedia explains the move as a response to counterfeiting, at a time when famous sake labels were pasted onto bottles of other drink, and says the company’s own bottle works helped it stop fakes reaching the market.

Whisky arrived surprisingly early. The company history says its distillery plant was completed in 1919, and that in the same year it released White Oak Whisky, together with Charmant brandy and a shochu and a mirin under the Shiratama name. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Whisky Magazine Japan, says the company obtained a whisky licence in 1919, four years before Kotobukiya, the company now known as Suntory, completed its Yamazaki distillery in 1923. The same article notes that the site had no pot still in 1919, so how that first whisky was produced is unclear. Chris Bunting made the same point on his Japanese whisky blog Nonjatta in 2008: the company is said to have begun selling whisky in 1919, but what that whisky was like, and where it was made, is not known.

A new distillery in 1984, and a single malt that waited until 2007.

The modern chapter began in 1984, when, the company says, it completed a new whisky distillery next to its headquarters. English Wikipedia calls the operation the White Oak distillery and lists two pot stills there. The timing was hard. Nonjatta, quoting Taylor Smisson and Hideo Yamaoka in the Malt Whisky Yearbook 2008, reported that the shochu boom of the mid-1980s, the 1989 revision of Japan’s liquor tax law and cheaper imports all took their toll, and that malt whisky was distilled only occasionally, almost all of it going into the company’s White Oak blends.

The Akashi name came later. English Wikipedia, citing Nonjatta, says the distillery released its first single malt in late 2007 under the Akashi label. Bunting reported that it was an eight-year-old whisky in a limited bottling, and, quoting the same yearbook, that much of the distillery’s whisky was matured in sherry hogsheads that had previously been used by Scotch distillers.

The name on the label is a lesson in script. Bunting noted that while the White Oak brand was usually written in the Latin alphabet, the Akashi single malt spelled its name in hiragana, あかし, the rounded Japanese syllabary. For overseas drinkers searching for the bottle, he set out the hiragana for Akashi, the katakana for White Oak and the kanji for Eigashima side by side.

Whisky sits in a wide range. Japanese Wikipedia describes Eigashima Shuzo as a maker of sake, shochu and Western-style spirits, including the Akashi single malt, the White Oak blended whisky and Charmant brandy and wine. The company launched Charmant wine in 1963 from a winery in Yamanashi Prefecture, which Japanese Wikipedia places in Hokuto. In 1981 it took over the business of Oita Shuzo and opened a shochu plant in Ōita Prefecture; Japanese Wikipedia says that plant closed in March 2007 and its barley shochu production moved to Akashi.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drinks names: Founders, Coors Light, Akashi, Proper No. Twelve, UV, Cappelletti and Select. Drinks brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A drinks brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle or can than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Seven wooden storehouses and a name shared with a city.

The site itself is part of the identity. Japanese Wikipedia says Eigashima Shuzo has seven wooden storehouses on a single site, which it calls unusual in Japan, and that all seven are still in use, each with its own job; the company’s history dates the first to 1889 and the seventh to 1959, and says the second now stores shochu and whisky. The sixth, completed in 1918, was a filming location for the NHK morning drama Amakara Shan in 1997, the company says.

Sake still sits beside the whisky. Lists of prize-winners published by Japan’s National Research Institute of Brewing show Kamitaka sake taking gold awards at the Japan Sake Awards for the 2017 and 2018 brewing years. For many years, Japanese Wikipedia adds, a neon sign for Kamitaka stood outside Akashi Station; it was removed in 2013 during the redevelopment of the station area. The company runs booked tours of its brewery and distillery, which Japanese Wikipedia says resumed in July 2022 after a pause during the pandemic.

The name needs care online. Akashi is first of all a city, and searches also turn up the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge across the strait to Awaji Island. The whisky’s maker publishes under its own company name, at ei-sake.jp, rather than under the Akashi name.

For a design guide, Akashi shows how a sake house can carry whisky under a city’s name, written in hiragana, while its older sake, wine and shochu labels share the same storehouses. Compare Suntory, the Osaka group behind Yamazaki, and Gekkeikan, the sake house of Fushimi in Kyoto. For this guide we use oak amber, cask brown and storehouse black with a Mincho serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Akashi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.