Learn More: What's the Difference Between Whiskey, Bourbon, Scotch, and Rye?.It remains a privately owned company in Japan to this day. Nikka expanded their production to a second facility in Miyagikyo in 1969 to expand on the varieties of spirits that the original distillery was producing. The first distillation took place following the installation of a custom copper pot and still in 1936, and their first product launched in 1940 under a shortened English translation of the company name, “NIKKA WHISKY.” When his ten year contract expired in 1934, he decided to strike out on his own, forming the “Great Japanese Juice Company” and setting up a distillery in Yoichi, Hokkaido. Upon his return, Taketsuru learned that the company that had sponsored his research trip to Scotland had been forced to close due to the recession following World War I, so he joined a company that would later go on to become the Japanese distillery powerhouse Suntory and helped them produce Japan’s first whiskey. While in Scotland, he fell in love with Rita Cowan, the daughter of a local doctor in Glasgow, and they married and returned to Japan together in 1920.
He spent the next two years studying at the University of Glasgow and the Hazelburn distillery where he filled two notebooks with his notes on every aspect of the Scottish distilling process, notebooks that would form the guide for making Japan’s first locally produced whiskey. Born into a family of sake brewers, he was determined to bring the art of making a “genuine” whiskey to Japan and so struck out alone travelling halfway across the globe to learn from the people who started it all. can trace its roots back to 1918, when founder Masataka Taketsuru traveled to Scotland to learn the secrets of scotch whisky production.