Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
Cardrona Distillery’s production philosophy — the decisions behind how the whisky is made — is as distinctive as the founder’s story and the bra fence. The details matter, because they are what creates the character that makes Cardrona recognisable.
The Handfill Experience
Among the most direct ways to engage with a distillery’s whisky is to fill your own bottle from the cask — an experience Cardrona offers to visitors. The handfill experience, where you select a cask, draw the spirit with a valinch (a copper sampling tube), and fill a bottle that is then sealed and labelled in front of you, creates a connection between drinker and production that is qualitatively different from purchasing a finished product.
The spirit you draw from a cask at Cardrona is not the same as what is in the standard bottles. It is the whisky as it exists at one specific moment in one specific barrel — with all the variation and particularity that implies.
The Cardrona Production Approach
Cardrona uses a combination of small and large pot stills — a rare approach that allows the distillery to produce spirit of different weights and textures using different still sizes. Small stills produce heavier, oilier spirit with more copper contact relative to volume. Large stills produce lighter spirit. The ability to work with both means Cardrona can create a range of components for blending rather than being committed to a single house character.
This flexibility reflects founder Desiree Reid’s background as a lawyer and analytical thinker: understanding what variables you can control and using them deliberately is not just a scientific approach — it is how serious professionals in any field think about the systems they work within.
Cardrona whisky is available at Bar Little Happiness. Read the full Japanese column: little-happiness.jp/columns/cardrona-production-process/
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