Nagahama

Nagahama is a whisky distillery inside a brewpub. Nagahama Roman Beer has brewed beer on the shore of Lake Biwa in Shiga since 1996, and in 2016 it put a set of very small pot stills in the same building, making it one of the smallest whisky distilleries in Japan. The stills are shaped like the domes of Arabic architecture, which earned them the nickname aranbic.

Because its own output is so small, Nagahama sells two kinds of whisky, and the names tell you which is which. Amahagan World Malt, and blended malts such as Inazuma, combine Nagahama's malt with malt whisky imported from overseas, matured and blended in Nagahama. The Nagahama single malts, released in small batches since 2020, are entirely its own spirit. Nagahama does not publish bottle by bottle whether each one meets the Japanese whisky labelling standard, but the World Malt label is a clear statement that the whisky is not all Japanese.