About

Japanese whisky is written about almost entirely from outside Japan. This site is written from inside it.

What we do differently

Every good English guide to Japanese whisky can tell you what a bottle tastes like. None of them can tell you what it costs on a shelf in Osaka, whether you would have to enter a lottery to buy one, or whether the bottle meets the Japanese whisky standard that came into force in 2024. Those three things need someone here to check them, and they are the three things we carry on every bottle.

Where the numbers come from

• Yen prices are what the bottle sells for in Japan, not an importer price. Each one carries the month it was checked.
• Ratings out of 100 are our own editorial judgement, not an aggregate of other people's scores.
• The eight flavour axes are our estimates, scored consistently across every bottle so they can be compared to each other.

Every figure on the site is labelled with where it came from and the month it was checked. Where a number is our estimate rather than an observation, it says so on the page rather than in a footnote. Prices older than six months are flagged as possibly out of date.

What we will not do

• Publish a Japan-versus-overseas markup unless both prices have actually been observed. An estimated markup would be the one number on this site worth nothing.
• Recommend a bottle because it pays better. See our disclosure.
• Cover Scotch, bourbon or world whisky. That is a different site with a different reader.

Corrections

Prices move and allocations change. If something here is wrong, tell us on the contact page and we will fix it and re-date it.