A craft brewery by Lake Biwa adds a distillery for its 20th year.

Nagahama Distillery grew out of a beer business. Its owner, Nagahama Roman Beer, is based in Nagahama, a city on the northeastern shore of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture. Japanese Wikipedia dates the company to August 1995, and the company’s own profile says beer production began on 13 March 1996; the premises combine a craft brewery with a restaurant, which the company describes as a beer hall in a converted rice storehouse.

The company is part of a larger retail group. A recruitment profile for Liquor Mountain, a liquor retailer that opened its first store in Nagahama in 1991 and a Kyoto head office in 2006, lists Nagahama Roman Beer as a group company it set up in 1995. The same timeline says that in 2022 another group company, Tensei Shuzo, set up the Hishida Distillery as the group’s second whisky site.

Whisky came two decades after the beer. Japanese Wikipedia says the distillery was built inside the brewpub building as a project to mark the company’s 20th anniversary. The company profile gives 1 November 2016 as the date the distillery was established, and Japanese Wikipedia dates the first distillation to 16–17 November 2016, with full operation from 2017. Water comes from underground sources fed by Mount Ibuki, the same article says.

One brew, one cask, and a name read backwards.

The distillery’s working idea has a short Japanese slogan: 一醸一樽, “one brew, one cask.” Japanese Wikipedia explains that each production run yields roughly 200 to 250 litres of spirit, enough to fill a single cask, and the company uses the phrase on its own site. The equipment is small to match. The company profile lists three 1,000-litre pot stills, two for the first distillation and one for the second, heated indirectly by steam; Japanese Wikipedia, citing Stefan Van Eycken’s 2018 book Whisky Rising among other sources, says they are alembic-type stills from the Portuguese maker Hoga, and that the spirit still was replaced and a second wash still added in 2018. The same article describes a copper mash tun of 1,000 litres from the American supplier Bohemian Brewery Importers and four stainless-steel washbacks of 2,000 litres each. A release from the company in April 2020 described the stills’ very thin lyne arms and said the design drew on Scottish craft distilleries.

The distillery’s best-known name is a piece of wordplay. AMAHAGAN, the line the company calls its flagship, is NAGAHAMA spelled backwards. The company describes it as a “world malt”: whisky built on malt from overseas, blended with malt made at Nagahama. The first release, Edition No.1, is dated November 2018 on the company’s product page, and later editions have been finished in red wine, mizunara and yamazakura casks, alongside a peated version, metallic-label editions and bottles marking each year of the Chinese zodiac.

Collaborations carry the brand into other worlds. Japanese Wikipedia lists tie-in bottlings with the musician Kazuya Yoshii, the band UVERworld and the anime series Cowboy Bebop and Saint Seiya, and the company’s own site runs an artists’ collaboration range and a Saint Seiya “Gold Saint” whisky series.

Design and documentation.

The seven names in this group are all Japanese whisky distilleries: Fuji Gotemba, Nagahama, Akkeshi, Shizuoka, Saburomaru, Sakurao and Yuza. Some sit inside long-established drinks companies, some were built by sake or shochu makers adding a new spirit to an old business, and others are newer ventures built specifically to make whisky, in regions far from one another.

The phrase “Japanese whisky” on a label carries more weight than it used to. In 2021 the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association introduced a voluntary labelling standard, with a grace period that ended in 2024, under which, English Wikipedia says, a whisky sold as Japanese must be fermented, distilled, matured and bottled in Japan. A distillery’s identity therefore rests not only on its label and its name but on where its spirit is actually made, how long it has been aged and what, if anything, has been blended in.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the distillery and when, who owns it now, where its whisky is distilled and matured, and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From new make to a single malt under its own name.

The distillery sold its spirit before it was old enough to be whisky. Japanese Wikipedia says the first bottled product was Nagahama New Make in 2017, followed by AMAHAGAN in 2018. The first whiskies under the town’s own name came three years after distilling began: the company announced on 28 April 2020 that three single malt Nagahama bottlings, each a single cask at cask strength, would go on sale through liquor shops across Japan on 19 May 2020. One had spent three years in a bourbon barrel, one finished in an oloroso sherry quarter cask and one matured in new mizunara oak from lightly peated malt.

A vatting of the distillery’s own spirit came later. Japanese Wikipedia dates Single Malt Nagahama THE FIRST BATCH, made only from whisky distilled at Nagahama, to 11 October 2022, and lists a further brand, INAZUMA, from 2021. The company says it aims to make whisky that whisky lovers around the world will still enjoy a hundred years from now.

The beer has not been left behind. Japanese Wikipedia reports that in August 2025 the company agreed to take over the Wakasa Beer brand from the Fukui Prefecture town of Mihama after its maker went bankrupt, and the company’s own site now sells a Nagahama Amber Ale presented as a revival of Wakasa beer. The company lists beer brewing and whisky distilling side by side as its business.

For a design guide, Nagahama Distillery shows how a small maker can turn its own place name into two brands at once: single malt Nagahama read forwards and AMAHAGAN read backwards, with the brewpub and the one-cask slogan behind both. Compare it with Chichibu and Kanosuke, two other young Japanese distilleries. For this guide we use copper still, cask brown and Biwa blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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