From neutral spirit in Sakata to single malt below Mount Chokai.

Yuza is the whisky of Yuza Distillery (遊佐蒸溜所), which stands in the town of Yuza in Yamagata Prefecture, at the foot of Mount Chokai on the northern edge of the Shonai Plain. It belongs to Kinryu (株式会社金龍), a distiller based in the port city of Sakata, about half an hour’s drive away, a city also home to the sake brewer Tatenokawa.

Kinryu is far older than its whisky. The company says it was founded in Sakata in April 1950 as Yamagata Hakko Kogyo, a fermentation-industry company set up through the cooperation of nine sake makers in Yamagata Prefecture, and that it took the name Kinryu in 1966. Japanese Wikipedia, citing a profile in the magazine ONESTORY, says the nine brewers founded it to supply distilled alcohol to sake makers and to make shochu. Its core business is kōrui shochu; the company dates its Sawayaka (爽) shochu to 1978.

The move into whisky was reported before a brick was laid. Japanese Wikipedia cites reports in the Nikkei and the Mainichi Shimbun of May 2017 on the plan. The company’s own timeline says construction began on 25 October 2017, after a site search that the distillery says took two years and covered more than ten candidate locations before it settled on the Yoshide district of Yuza, an area chosen for underground water from Mount Chokai. In 1996 the district was named among Japan’s hundred “water villages,” the distillery says.

In an account first published in the Japanese magazine Whisky Galore in April 2021 and translated into English by the site Nomunication that July, the writer Mamoru Tsuchiya reported that Kinryu’s president, Masaharu Sasaki, wanted to make a single malt for the world market rather than only for local drinkers.

Scottish stills, fir washbacks and a deliberately small plant.

The equipment came from Scotland. The distillery’s timeline records that its pot stills were unpacked and installed on 6 July 2018, that it received its whisky licence on 27 September, that commissioning by the still maker Forsyths began on 11 October, that the building was completed on 19 October 2018 and that whisky-making began on 1 November 2018. Nomunication, citing the Nikkei, reported on 22 October 2018 that Forsyths engineers had trained the team in early October and that distillation would start the following month.

Tsuchiya’s 2021 report describes a plant built around Scottish practice: a semi-lauter mash tun by Forsyths, five wooden washbacks of Douglas fir, a straight-headed wash still and a spirit still with a bulge, both with long, downward-sloping lyne arms, and a mostly unpeated spirit. He reported that Forsyths advised on almost every stage from planning to test distillation, and that the whisky was being made by two young women, both graduates of Yamagata University, neither of whom had made any alcohol before. The distillery itself stresses scale: it describes a site of about 4,550 square metres and a distillery building of about 620 square metres as “very small.”

The brand’s idea is summed up in a four-letter word of its own. The distillery calls its concept TLAS, from Tiny, Lovely, Authentic and Supreme. Tsuchiya’s report adds the one documented detail of the visual identity: the distillery’s logo shows a pot still and Mount Chokai, the stills and the mountain water that the site was built around. The company writes its product names in capitals, as YUZA followed by a year or an edition.

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.

Edition by edition, then a yearly single malt.

The first whisky waited for its age. The distillery says it ships only whisky it judges fully matured, and its timeline shows the first bottling, YUZA First edition 2022, released in February 2022; the company says it was drawn only from bourbon barrels filled between November 2018 and January 2019. Japanese Wikipedia cites the Yamagata Shimbun of November 2021 and the Kahoku Shimpo on the launch announcement. A Second edition 2022 followed in October 2022, the distillery added a third maturation warehouse in November 2022, and a Third edition arrived in November 2023.

From 2023 the editions were joined by a yearly single malt named for its year: YUZA 2023 in May 2023, then YUZA 2024, YUZA 2025 and YUZA 2026, which the company describes as matured in bourbon casks. Serai, the Shogakukan lifestyle magazine, chose YUZA 2025 in its March 2026 list of Japanese whiskies to drink now, describing a fruity, honeyed bourbon-cask single malt made along Scottish lines. Seasonal and cask-strength bottlings have run alongside, including a six-year-old released in June 2025.

Since October 2024 Yuza has also made blends. The company says its Classical Blend and its Signature Blend, released in March 2025, combine its own malt whiskies, including spirit from Mizunara casks, with grain whisky made in Japan. It describes every product in its range as meeting the “Japanese whisky” labelling standard of the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association, a voluntary standard introduced in 2021 that English Wikipedia says requires fermentation, distillation, maturation and bottling in Japan.

The name needs a little care online. It comes from the town of Yuza, not from the citrus fruit yuzu; the distillery’s own site is yuza-disty.jp and its owner’s is kinryu.co.jp.

For a design guide, Yuza shows how a young distillery can draw its identity from two things it can point to, a pot still and the mountain whose water it uses, and let the year on the label do the rest. Compare Kanosuke, the Komasa family’s whisky distillery at Hioki in Kagoshima, and Chichibu, Ichiro Akuto’s distillery in Saitama. For this guide we use bourbon amber, fir brown and Chokai slate with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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