Honbo Shuzo (本坊酒造) will add a 200ml bottle to its Single Malt Komagatake (シングルモルト駒ヶ岳) line in mid-September 2026, giving the Nagano distillery’s core single malt its smallest format yet. The bottling is 45% ABV and carries a suggested price of 2,750 yen, roughly 19 US dollars, against 7,920 yen for the standard 700ml.
Single Malt Komagatake is a recent fixture rather than an old one. For years the distillery released a Komagatake single malt only once a year, in limited numbers. Honbo says stocks of several maturing vintages finally reached the point where it could supply a single malt year round, and it launched the current bottling as a permanent product in September 2025. The 200ml is aimed at gifts, travel and casual pours, and the whisky inside is the same as the 700ml.
The distillery describes the profile as clean and rich, with notes of apple tea, apricot and ripe persimmon, a smooth mouthfeel and a long finish. It does not carry an age statement.
One distillery, two names
The site sits in Miyada (宮田村), at about 800 meters near the foot of Kiso-Komagatake in the Central Alps, and drew its first spirit in 1985. Honbo paused distilling through the lean years for Japanese whisky and restarted in 2011. In March 2024 it renamed the plant from Mars Shinshu (マルス信州) to Mars Komagatake, to line the distillery up with the Komagatake brand. Overseas buyers will still see both names on older bottles and on secondary-market listings. Honbo also runs the younger Mars Tsunuki (津貫) distillery in Kagoshima and an aging cellar on Yakushima.
Why this matters beyond Japan
Mars is one of the more reliably exported Japanese single malt names, and Komagatake and Tsunuki bottlings turn up regularly at specialist retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe, usually in the 700ml size. The 200ml is a domestic convenience format and has not been announced for export, but it signals that Honbo now treats Komagatake as a standing product with steady supply, not a yearly allocation drop. That is the same shift several mid-size Japanese distilleries have made lately, including Mars itself a year ago and, this autumn, Yuza. For anyone tracking which Japanese single malts are becoming easier to actually buy, a smaller, cheaper Komagatake at home is a useful marker even if the bottle never leaves Japan. Miyada is also open to visitors and lies on the way between Tokyo and the older distilleries of central Japan, listed in our distilleries directory.
Source: Gourmet Press (Japanese), carrying the Honbo Shuzo press release