KOCHI -- Japan's first whisky brewed exclusively from domestically grown malt and corn has begun production here.

Kochi University Faculty of Agriculture and Marine Sciences lecturer Kazutoshi Hamada and his students are brewing the purely Japanese whisky using local yellow corn "jikibi" and barley raised in the town of Otoyo, Kochi Prefecture. According to the Tokyo-based Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association, domestically brewed whisky is made from almost entirely imported ingredients, and it has reportedly never heard of any 100-percent-Japanese brews.

"We would like to develop a signature agricultural product, increase the income of local farmers and also pass down the 'jikibi' culture here," said Hamada of his "kill three birds with one stone" goals for the endeavor.

Jikibi is a kind of flint corn, or calico corn, and while is it not as sweet as varieties of sweet corn, it can be grown in soil unsuited for rice. It has become a staple food in the mountainous areas of the Shikoku region including Otoyo. Jikibi has been grown there since the Edo period, and while flint corn was grown in Kumamoto and Toyama prefectures as well, the introduction of new varieties of corn and the expansion of rice cultivation apparently decreased the production of flint corn since the time of Japan's rapid economic growth period.

Hamada encountered the flint corn during fieldwork in 2014, and began cultivating a crop with his students in an abandoned field in the Youne district of Otoyo. After using the corn the following year to make distilled spirits, or shochu in Japanese, they began planning to brew whisky. In 2016, the group started to cultivate barley for the malt necessary to brew the beverage. With the 550 kilograms of barley harvested up until June of this year and the roughly 500 kilograms of jikibi harvested before winter last year, the group contracted a brewery in the prefecture and succeeded in making a test batch of the whisky.

While the brew does not meet the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association definition of "bourbon," a whisky being aged in a charred white oak barrel for two years or more among other requirements, as far as the association and other domestic brewers are aware, it is the first purely domestic Japanese whisky. The group hopes to debut the brew next summer at the earliest.