Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
One of the most interesting distilleries in Japan is in my own city — and until I visited, I knew almost nothing about it. That says something about how much is happening in Japanese whisky right now, and how easy it is to miss.
Setouchi Distillery is located in Kure, Hiroshima — a port city with a long industrial history, about 30 kilometres from central Hiroshima. The company behind it, a sake brewery, has been operating for more than 170 years. In the years following the pandemic, the family made a decision that would have seemed unlikely even five years earlier: they would start making whisky.
Why Whisky, and Why Now
The logic, as explained by the two brothers who now run the operation, is a straightforward inversion. In sake, the freshest product is the most valuable — the value declines with time. In whisky, the opposite is true: new make spirit is the least valuable thing in the warehouse, and value accumulates over years of maturation. For a family business thinking in terms of decades, whisky offers something sake cannot: an asset that grows more valuable the longer you hold it.
The 100-year horizon, for a company that already has 170 years behind it, is not metaphor. It is planning.
The Obsession: Old Macallan
The older of the two brothers became obsessed, at some point in his whisky education, with a style of whisky that no longer exists commercially: the heavy sherry cask expressions of Macallan from the 1960s and 1970s. The rich, dark, nut-and-dried-fruit character of that era — produced by a combination of production practices and cask selection that the modern Macallan has largely moved away from — represents, for him, an unreachable ideal.
His response was to try to recreate it himself.
The Unconventional Middle Cut
The most distinctive technical choice at Setouchi is the approach to the middle cut — the fraction of the distillation run that is collected as usable spirit.
Most distilleries collect middle cut down to approximately 61% ABV, stopping before the heavier, oilier compounds start to come over in quantity. Setouchi deliberately extends the cut down to 40% ABV — collecting a fraction that most distilleries would classify as feints. These heavier compounds are what create the concentrated, almost syrupy character of old-style Macallan sherry cask expressions. They are also what most modern distilleries consider too risky to include in any quantity.
Setouchi collects them intentionally, then relies on sherry cask maturation to transform them into something beautiful over time. The younger brother, a former MRI researcher, has brought a scientific framework to this process — designing the maturation programme around a 90% sherry cask target and a 200-year quality vision.
Setouchi Distillery whisky is available at Bar Little Happiness. Read the full Japanese series: little-happiness.jp/columns/setouchi-whisky/
Bar Little Happiness | Hiroshima, Japan
Rum & Whisky specialists | 1,000+ bottles | English menu available
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