Mars

Mars is the whisky label of Hombo Shuzo, a shochu maker from Kagoshima founded in 1872. It runs two distilleries at opposite ends of the country: Mars Komagatake, at 798 metres in Nagano's Central Alps, which is the highest whisky distillery in Japan, and Mars Tsunuki, back home in Kagoshima in the far south. It also ages whisky in a cellar on Yakushima, a World Heritage island off Kyushu. One company, three very different climates.

The Iwai and Twin Alps blends are the everyday bottles. Maltage Cosmo is a blended malt, and the Komagatake single malts are the distillery's own spirit. Hombo does not publish bottle by bottle whether each one meets the Japanese whisky labelling standard.

Mars has the oldest connection to Japanese whisky of anyone outside the big two. Hombo got its whisky licence in 1949 and made its first whisky under the guidance of Kiichiro Iwai, the man who, at another company, had sent Masataka Taketsuru to Scotland in 1918. Kurakichi Hombo, Iwai's son-in-law, worked under him.

Production moved to Yamanashi in 1960, and in 1985 the company opened the Shinshu distillery in Nagano. Shinshu stopped distilling in 1992. It started again in 2011, after 19 years silent. Tsunuki followed in 2016, bringing malt distillation back to Kagoshima after 32 years, along with the Yakushima cellar. In 2024 Shinshu was renamed Mars Komagatake, after the mountain it sits under.

The first stills at Shinshu were built to Iwai's design, and the original pot still ran until 2014. It now stands on display at the distillery, replaced by new stills.

Komagatake's water is snowmelt from the Central Alps, and the site is known for deep fog. Fermentation uses both stainless steel and wooden vessels. The distillery works from late August to the end of the following June and stops through summer for maintenance.

The point of the three sites is maturation. Spirit ageing in cold mountain air at Komagatake, in the warm south at Tsunuki and in the humid sea air of Yakushima matures at different speeds and picks up different character, which gives the blenders more to work with than one warehouse could.