Nukada distillery: Kiuchi Shuzo and its whisky origin story

Nukada (額田) is not a brand name. It is a place: a district of Naka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, in Japan’s Kanto region, where the sake brewer Kiuchi Shuzo (木内酒造) has operated since 1823 and where, in February 2016, the company distilled whisky for the first time. The distillery that grew out of that first small run is one of the lesser-documented entries in Japan’s whisky boom, in part because Kiuchi Shuzo has spent most of its history known for other things entirely — sake, and later the Hitachino Nest craft beer brand that gave it an export reputation long before whisky did.

This guide covers why a two-century-old sake brewer moved into whisky, what its own account says about the decision, and how the Nukada operation relates to the larger, newer distillery the company later built to scale up whisky production. As with all of our distillery coverage, we have not tasted Kiuchi Shuzo’s whisky and make no claims about how it drinks.

A 200-year sake brewer’s long route to whisky

Kiuchi Shuzo was founded in 1823 in what is now Naka City, Ibaraki, making the sake brand Kikumori (菊盛). For roughly a century and a half, sake was the business, and the company today still describes itself as a general alcohol producer rather than a single-category specialist — alongside sake, beer, and whisky, it also makes shochu, liqueurs, and wine from the same corporate base in Naka City. That breadth is worth keeping in mind when comparing Kiuchi Shuzo to Japan’s larger, whisky-only houses: whisky is one line among several for a company that has spent two centuries adding categories rather than replacing them. That changed in 1996, when a revision to Japan’s liquor licensing rules made small-batch brewing newly viable, and the company launched Hitachino Nest, a craft beer line that went on to build an international following well beyond Ibaraki. Whisky came later still. According to an interview published by WHISKY Magazine Japan, Kiuchi Shuzo installed distillation equipment in 2003 as part of a broader company philosophy around reducing waste through recycling — reusing byproducts of its brewing operations rather than discarding them. That equipment, originally adopted for other purposes, became the basis for the company’s move into whisky distillation more than a decade later.

Why whisky, and why the company says it was not chasing the boom

The timing question matters here more than usual, because Kiuchi Shuzo’s own account explicitly pushes back on the assumption that it entered whisky to ride the export boom that took off internationally in the 2010s. The WHISKY Magazine Japan interview quotes the company’s plans as originating “over a decade before” the article’s 2016 publication date, when Japanese whisky was, in the company’s own framing, in difficulty rather than in demand, and states plainly that the project “was never a case of jumping on the Japanese whisky boom.” Toshiyuki Kiuchi, who led the project, is described in the same interview as a longtime whisky enthusiast with firsthand experience visiting Scotland, who nonetheless wanted Nukada’s whisky to avoid simply reproducing Scottish conventions. The interview describes him looking instead to American craft distilling for ideas about equipment and approach, aiming for what the company called, in its own words, “true Japanese whisky” rather than a domestic copy of an imported style.

The land and grain connection: a recycling project that became a whisky

The most concrete link between Nukada’s whisky and the land it comes from is agricultural, not scenic. Kiuchi Shuzo had been running a project since 2004 to revive Kaneko Golden (金子ゴールデン), a barley variety the company’s own materials describe as having fallen out of use, growing it for use in its beer. Some of that harvest turned out to have a protein content too high for good beer-making, according to the WHISKY Magazine Japan account — a mismatch that would ordinarily mean waste. Rather than discard the surplus, the company treated it as the raw material for a new use: distillation. That decision, driven by an existing environmental commitment to not letting brewing byproducts go to waste, is what the interview credits as the direct origin of the whisky project, ahead of any commercial calculation about the whisky market. Ibaraki itself is one of Japan’s barley-growing prefectures, and Kiuchi Shuzo’s interviews describe ongoing interest in other regionally grown grains, including a newer barley variety cultivated in neighboring Tochigi Prefecture and rice, as future mash bill ingredients, extending the same local-sourcing logic beyond the original recycling project.

From a 700-litre test run to a dedicated distillery

Nukada’s first whisky run in February 2016 was small by any standard: a 700-litre wash producing an estimated 60 to 80 litres of new make spirit, run through a hybrid still, a still design combining pot and column elements that the WHISKY Magazine Japan interview credits Kiuchi Shuzo as one of the first Japanese producers to adopt. The company ordered a larger, 5,000-litre hybrid still for delivery in early 2017 as it looked to scale beyond that first experimental batch.

That scale-up eventually took the form of a second, dedicated facility. In 2020, Kiuchi Shuzo opened Yasato Distillery (八郷蒸溜所) in the Yasato area of Ishioka City, also in Ibaraki, converting a former community hall on a large plot of land into a purpose-built whisky production site. Japanese-language coverage describes Yasato as the facility where whisky production was scaled up to commercial volumes, with capacity cited at up to 300,000 litres a year and several thousand casks aging on site — a different order of magnitude from Nukada’s original test batches. A visitor center opened at Yasato in 2023, according to Nikkei reporting, giving the company a public-facing tourism and tasting operation that the original Nukada site never had. Kiuchi Shuzo sells its whisky under the Hinomaru Whisky (日の丸ウイスキー) name, including variations such as a rice-and-malt blend introduced in 2023, and continues to credit Nukada as the project’s starting point even as Yasato has become the larger production site.

The two sites now play distinct, documented roles rather than simply duplicating each other. A July 2022 company press release marking Kiuchi Shuzo’s 200th anniversary as a sake brewer describes a release called Hinomaru Whisky The 1st Edition as a blend of column-still spirit from Nukada, in Naka City, and pot-still spirit from Yasato, in Ishioka City — the company’s own materials use “column still” for Nukada’s equipment by that point, language that lines up with the earlier trade press description of a hybrid still combining pot and column elements. The same release states the whisky used Ibaraki-grown malt, wheat, and rice among its raw materials, and was matured “in the rich natural surroundings at the foot of Mount Tsukuba,” giving a specific, sourced answer to how this whisky connects to the land it comes from, beyond the barley-recycling story that started the project. The release also notes the spirit inside was aged under three years at the time of sale, which matters for buyers: a whisky that young would not yet meet the three-year cask-aging minimum in the JSLMA labelling standard covered below.

What this means if you are trying a bottle

A few practical points follow from the history above. First, because production scaled from a genuinely small 2016 test run, older Nukada-labeled bottlings are likely to have been made in much smaller volume than anything released after Yasato came online in 2020, which is worth knowing if you are trying to date a bottle. Second, not every Hinomaru Whisky release is aged long enough to be labelled “Japanese whisky” under the current industry standard — the July 2022 1st Edition release, for instance, was sold with less than three years of cask aging by the company’s own description, short of the three-year minimum the JSLMA standard requires, so it is worth checking the age statement and category wording on any specific bottle rather than assuming every release qualifies. Third, the hybrid and column still equipment Kiuchi Shuzo has used from the start is different from the classic Scottish-style copper pot stills most Japanese distilleries favor, which is a production detail rather than a quality signal — we have not tasted the results and are not making a claim about how that translates into the glass. Our guide to what actually counts as Japanese whisky walks through the full JSLMA standard, and our guide to spotting a bottle that is not really Japanese whisky covers the label language worth checking on any release. For a wider view of how Kiuchi Shuzo compares to the dozens of other sake, shochu, and beer producers that moved into whisky over the same decade, our index of Japan’s whisky distilleries lists them by region.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• WHISKY Magazine Japan, “木内酒造額田蒸溜所とジャパニーズウイスキーの革新” (part 1 of 2), 2016 (Japanese)
• WHISKY Magazine Japan, “木内酒造額田蒸溜所とジャパニーズウイスキーの革新” (part 2 of 2), 2016 (Japanese)
• 木内酒造株式会社 (Kiuchi Shuzo), official Yasato Distillery page, kiuchibrewery.co.jp (Japanese)
• 木内酒造株式会社, “創業200年を迎える木内酒造の新しい試み『日の丸ウイスキー The 1st Edition』数量限定販売,” PR TIMES, July 2022 (Japanese)
• 日本経済新聞 (Nikkei), coverage of the Yasato Distillery visitor facility, Ishioka, October 2023 (Japanese)