A fruit-wine plant that learned to make malt whisky.

Omar is the single malt whisky of the Nantou Distillery, in Nantou City, in central Taiwan. The site is owned by Taiwan Tobacco & Liquor Corporation, or TTL, the state-owned company whose parent is Taiwan’s Ministry of Finance and which, English Wikipedia says, succeeded the island’s old Monopoly Bureau on 1 July 2002. The same company makes Taiwan Beer.

The plant was not built for whisky. Its director, Chao-an Chan, told The Spirits Business in March 2020 that Nantou Winery was built in 1977 and had made wine, brandy, fruit wines and rum ever since; Chinese Wikipedia and a 2019 report in Mirror Media give 1978. Mirror Media described it as a fruit-wine plant set up to take surplus fruit from local farms.

The turn came after Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization in 2002 and the liquor monopoly ended. Mirror Media reported that imported whisky became popular as Scotch prices rose during a global shortage, and that the plant’s director at the time, Lin Jin-dan, went to Scotland to study whisky making while the team consulted German and British sources on equipment. Chan told The Spirits Business that TTL decided to make its own whisky because fine whisky was in short supply, and that the malt distillery was designed by a group of experienced Taiwanese technicians.

The whisky line was set up on the winery site in 2008, according to The Spirits Business and the German trade site about-drinks; English Wikipedia says the first new-make spirit followed in 2009. Mirror Media listed the still house in 2019 as three malt storage tanks, eight stainless-steel fermenters and four copper pot stills.

The site has had to rebuild once before. Chinese Wikipedia says the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake damaged the winery’s brandy warehouse and that the plant was rebuilt with government help. Leadership has changed several times since the whisky line opened: about-drinks named Puli Pan as director from 2012, and by 2020 The Spirits Business was interviewing Chao-an Chan in the same role.

Single casks first, then a name.

The first releases were single casks. Mirror Media and English Wikipedia both date the first single-cask bottlings to 2013, and a 2025 report in the Commercial Times says Omar has entered international competitions since 2014. The name Omar, the German trade site about-drinks reported in October 2016, comes from the Scottish Gaelic word for amber, the colour of the whisky; Mirror Media gives the Chinese slogan as “amber heart, Taiwanese feeling.”

Two bottlings carried the brand abroad. In October 2016 about-drinks reported that the Bremer Spirituosen Contor would distribute an Omar Bourbon Cask and an Omar Sherry Cask in Germany from November, both at 46% and not chill-filtered. On 7 September 2018 TTL announced the Bourbon and Sherry versions in the United States, saying the subtropical heat speeds maturation and raises the angels’ share. Chan told The Spirits Business in 2020 that Taiwan remained the main market, that the malt, equipment and casks are sourced overseas, and that a separate brand, Yushan, had been created for Europe. He listed exports to Japan, Korea, Russia, Australia and the United States, and plans for a new warehouse and for remodelling the winery grounds for distillery tours. TTL’s 2018 release described the whiskies as aged three to four years.

The winery’s past shapes the casks. The Commercial Times reported in December 2024 that since 2015 the distillery has released cask-strength whiskies aged in casks that had held its own lychee, plum, grape, orange and other fruit wines and liqueurs. It also bought a set of Pedro Ximénez sherry casks from a solera kept by the bodega Ximénez-Spínola in Jerez — in 2016 according to Mirror Media, 2015 according to the Commercial Times. Mirror Media reported that a single cask from those PX butts was bottled for the distillery’s tenth whisky anniversary, limited to 1,000 bottles and sold at Nantou and at TTL’s airport duty-free shops.

Asian craft spirits.

The six brands in this group are all spirits from Asia: Omar, Godawan, Kamet, Solan Gold, Three Societies and Kiyomi. Five are whisky names, from Taiwan, India and South Korea, and one is a rum from Okinawa. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small independent distilleries to labels that belong to much larger drinks groups or state-linked companies, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a duty-free shelf to a bar list abroad.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or names, sourced its grain or cane from elsewhere, 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 spirit is actually distilled, matured 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 spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Labels that borrow from Taiwanese painting.

Omar’s special editions lean on Taiwanese art. The Commercial Times reported in December 2024 that the packaging of a 15-year-old cask-strength PX sherry cask series — four single casks — carries four paintings by the painter Lin Yushan, among them “Two Tigers” and “Pine and Cranes for Longevity,” in a theme developed with Taiwan’s National Museum of History. The same report linked an earlier series to the watercolourist Ma Pai-sui and described the bottle of the sixth and final “Harvest” release in a purple-pink colour; the first of that series appeared in 2019.

The house style stays close to the liquid itself. The Nantou Distillery uses non-chill filtration to keep the whisky’s natural flavour and colour, the Commercial Times reported in August 2025, quoting the company, and it noted that the amber colour matches the brand name. Chinese Wikipedia says the site also keeps a barrel-shaped tasting room, opened in 1986, alongside exhibits on Taiwanese whisky and guided production tours by reservation.

Since the monopoly ended in 2002, private companies have been free to make spirits in Taiwan, English Wikipedia says. Among them is Kavalan, which English Wikipedia says King Car Group founded in Yilan in 2005, three years before Nantou added its whisky line.

For a design guide, Omar shows how a state-owned winery can build a whisky brand from a colour word, its own fruit casks and borrowed national art. Compare Kavalan, Taiwan’s privately owned single malt, and Taiwan Beer, TTL’s lager. For this guide we use amber, cask brown and a hill green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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