Kuju (久住), the only dedicated whisky distillery in Oita (大分) Prefecture, is putting out a whisky made for one job: the highball. Kuju Distillery Malt & Grain goes on sale on Friday, September 18, 2026, at liquor stores inside Oita, at 3,850 yen including tax (around $26 or £19) for a 700ml bottle. It is bottled at 46% ABV. Sales are limited to the prefecture, with the distillery citing a run of roughly 5,000 bottles.
The release is a deliberate turn away from the way young Japanese distilleries usually build a name. Kuju’s single malts sell for 13,000 yen and up. Malt & Grain is the opposite proposition: a blend of the distillery’s malt spirit with grain whisky, priced so that people in Oita can drink it regularly. The distillery says its own single malts and blended malts had become too expensive for many local drinkers to buy often, and that grain whisky brought the cost down.
It is also Kuju’s first bottling to use barley grown in Oita. A small part of the malt comes from grain raised by Green Hojin Nakano, a contract farm in Bungo-ono (豊後大野) that works land in an aging farming district. Master distiller and blender Yutaka Takeishi (武石裕) says the whisky is built to stay easy to drink across a long session, crisp with soda and carrying faint floral notes, and to pair with fried local dishes such as karaage and toriten. The distillery is marketing it as “Oita’s highball.”
The distillery
Kuju sits at about 560 meters in the Kuju highlands, inside Aso-Kuju National Park, in a converted building on the site of a closed sake brewery. Founder Shoji Utoda (宇戸田祥自), who runs the local drinks distributor Tsuzaki Shoji and co-founded the Whisky Talk Fukuoka festival, studied under Ichiro Akuto (肩土伊知郎) of Chichibu (秦父) and trained at Mars Tsunuki (津貫) before starting production in 2021. The distillery runs two Forsyth pot stills and five wooden washbacks and aims for a light, floral, Speyside-style spirit. Its first single malt, Kuju THE FIRST, arrived in 2025.
Why it matters outside Japan
For readers abroad this is a bottle to note rather than to hunt down. Kuju has no retail export program — its only overseas presence so far is a single malt sold on Japan Airlines international flights — and a few thousand prefecture-only bottles will be hard to find even in Tokyo. The interest is in the pattern. After years in which Japanese craft distilleries competed almost entirely on expensive single malts, several are now releasing cheaper everyday blends aimed at the highball — Yuza’s Special Blend and Saburomaru’s SAB. range among recent examples. One label note: Kuju has not called Malt & Grain a “Japanese whisky,” and the origin of its grain component is not stated, so it is best read as a blended whisky rather than a bottle that meets the 2021 industry standard.
Sources: Nikkei (Japanese); Kuju Distillery