Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
Kameda Distillery does not yet have a defined house style. Its founder, Tsunoda-shacho, is explicit about this — and equally explicit that the absence of a fixed style is not a problem but a strategy.
“Right now,” he told me, “we are showing people the range of what we can do.”
The maturation warehouse at Kameda is one of the most varied I have seen at a distillery of its size. Bourbon casks are the backbone, but alongside them sit mizunara (Japanese oak), French oak, Spanish oak, rum casks, wine casks, and mountain cherry barrels. A supply of refill casks comes from Mars Shinshu Distillery, another connection built through the shared values of smaller Japanese producers.
The Maple Syrup Cask
The discovery that stopped me in the maturation room was a Canadian maple syrup cask.
This was not a straightforward cask: it had previously held bourbon, then been used to mature maple syrup, creating an extraordinary layered character. Into this unusual vessel, Tsunoda-shacho had loaded heavily peated new make spirit.
His reasoning was characteristic: he likes whisky that holds contradictions — sweetness and intensity together, soft and powerful at once. The maple syrup cask seemed designed to deliver exactly that.
I have not tasted the finished result. The spirit is still maturing. But the thinking behind it tells you a great deal about what kind of whisky Kameda is going to become.
The JA Rice Warehouse
The most unexpected element of Kameda’s maturation programme is its primary warehouse: a former agricultural cooperative (JA) cold storage facility, originally built to store Niigata rice.
The building is stone construction — thick walls, stable temperatures year-round, designed to protect its contents from the extremes of Niigata’s climate. Tsunoda-shacho considers it ideal for slow, even maturation. He was able to use the facility because of the relationships he had built through his local barley sourcing programme: the same farmers whose barley goes into Kameda’s mash had a connection to the cooperative that made the conversation possible.
Everything at Kameda is connected. The local barley that defines the spirit’s character comes from the same community that provides the space where it matures. The whisky is not just made in Niigata — it is, in a meaningful sense, made of Niigata.
Read the full Japanese column: little-happiness.jp/columns/kameda-distillery-visit-vol3/
Bar Little Happiness | Hiroshima, Japan
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