Region & History

Anyone in Taiwan who wanted to distill their own alcohol until just a few decades ago was breaking the law. Since the era of Japanese colonial rule, the state had held a monopoly on tobacco and alcohol. After 1945, the government of the Republic of China continued this monopoly through the state Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau. Private distilleries simply didn't exist. Whisky came almost exclusively from abroad.

That changed in 2002. Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization, and the state beverage monopoly had to end. Lee Tien-Tsai, founder of the conglomerate King Car, saw the opportunity immediately. His company already produced coffee and other beverages. Now it was time to add a malt whisky of its own, distilled in a region that no one internationally yet associated with whisky.

The new distillery was built in just nine months in 2005, on a forty-hectare site in Yuanshan, a township in Yilan at the foot of the Xueshan mountain range. It was named Kavalan after the indigenous people who once settled here. On March 11, 2006, the first new spirit ran from the stills. It was developed with guidance from Scottish whisky researcher Jim Swan, who helped adapt classic methods to the subtropical climate.

In late 2008, Kavalan Classic came to market as the very first bottling, Taiwan's first-ever whisky. Seven years later, the distillery made headlines around the world. At the World Whiskies Awards 2015, Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique was crowned World's Best Single Malt in a blind tasting, beating out numerous traditional Scottish houses.

Today, with ten pairs of stills and more than three hundred thousand barrels maturing on-site, Kavalan ranks among the largest single malt distilleries in the world. It achieved this in less than twenty years since its founding. It remains the only distillery in Yilan. Taiwan's other whisky regions, such as Nantou, lie further south inland, under different climatic conditions.