Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
On April 26, 2026, Bar Little Happiness hosted a sold-out tasting evening for LAODI Rum’s 20th anniversary — with the distillery’s founder, Ikuzo Inoue, present in person at the bar.
Eleven seats filled immediately when the event was announced. We had to turn people away.
Twenty Years in Laos
LAODI was established in 2006 in Laos, by a Japanese entrepreneur who cleared jungle, negotiated with government ministers, and built — from nothing — what became one of Southeast Asia’s most internationally recognised craft rums. The full story of the distillery’s founding and survival is told across four separate columns on this site (see the LAODI series).
Twenty years is a long time in any business. In the craft spirits world, in a socialist country that had never issued a licence to a foreign distiller, it is remarkable.
The Anniversary Bottle: HAGUKUMU
The centrepiece of the evening was LAODI’s 20th anniversary limited release, named HAGUKUMU (はぐくむ) — a Japanese word meaning “to nurture” or “to cultivate.”
The name captures exactly what Inoue has spent twenty years doing: nurturing the sugarcane fields, the relationships with local farmers, the reputation of Laotian rum in the international market, and the community of people — in Laos and around the world — who have gathered around what he makes.
The Evening
We opened with LAODI White Rum mojitos — a choice that turned out to be exactly right for a warm April evening and a room full of people who were about to spend two hours listening to one of the most genuinely unusual entrepreneurial stories in the spirits world.
Guests tasted through the complete current LAODI range, then chose their favourites for unlimited additional pours — no extra charge, no time limit. The point was not quantity but depth: the chance to find the expression that resonated, and to return to it as many times as the evening required.
Inoue signed bottles for guests who wanted them and sat for photographs. The conversation that filled the room was not the kind you hear at commercial product launches. It was the kind you hear when someone with two decades of hard-earned conviction talks about what they made and why.
Several guests wrote to us afterwards. Their responses shared a common thread: something had changed in how they understood rum. Not just LAODI rum — rum.
What Inoue Said
The most memorable moment of the evening came when Inoue described why he had never come back to Japan permanently, even through the hardest years. His answer was not about commercial strategy or production capability. It was about a winery evening in the mountains of Nagano, decades earlier, when he first understood that making alcohol means making a place where people stop being defined by their titles and simply meet each other.
“Alcohol jumps over everything,” he said. “Status, gender, age. It lets people meet as people.”
LAODI is available at Bar Little Happiness across the full current range. Read the full Japanese report: little-happiness.jp/columns/laodi-20th-anniversary-tasting-event-report/
Bar Little Happiness | Hiroshima, Japan
Rum & Whisky specialists | 1,000+ bottles | English menu available
Open Mon–Sat 7PM–12:30AM, Sun 7PM–midnight
No cover charge. Walk-ins welcome.
english.little-happiness.jp