On a quiet afternoon in Hiroshima, I sat across from Ian Chang — Master Blender at KOMORO Distillery (KDI), formerly Master Blender and Distiller at Kavalan — and listened to him talk about his life for nearly two hours. He had travelled to Hiroshima specifically to meet me ahead of a special tasting event he agreed to host at Bar Little Happiness in July 2026.
By the end of the conversation, one word had risen to the surface and stayed there: inheritance.
How It Began — Accident and Family
Ian Chang did not plan to enter whisky. His father suffered a severe stroke while working in China, losing partial movement on one side of his body. His mother called him home from military service. He needed a job near the family. Kavalan Distillery was 20 minutes from home. He applied.
He was called for an interview that included a nosing test. He attributes his selection partly to his nine years studying in the UK, which may have made him useful in an internationally-oriented distillery still under construction. Kavalan, when Ian Chang arrived, was being built from zero. That detail would prove important.
Falling in Love in a Warehouse
A mentor at Kavalan took him to Scotland — to distilleries including The Glenlivet — and showed him the pot stills, the warehouses, the rows of quietly sleeping casks. Standing inside that warehouse, Ian Chang fell in love with whisky. “It was so romantic,” he said. “Like a fantasy world. So I decided to move forward and never look back.” Without that warehouse, without that mentor, there might be no Ian Chang as the world knows him today.
Dr. Jim Swan: The Teacher Who Stays
The defining figure in Ian Chang’s formation was Dr. Jim Swan — the legendary Scotch whisky consultant, now deceased, whose influence shaped distilleries across Asia and beyond. Dr. Swan’s first lesson to Ian Chang: “Whisky is a living thing. Coca-Cola can be made the same anywhere with the right recipe. Whisky cannot. You must adapt your methods to the climate, the conditions, the water of each place.”
Ian Chang came from food chemistry, not organic chemistry. He struggled at first. Dr. Swan’s knowledge filled the gap. Together they worked, over roughly 10 years, until Ian Chang had found his own style — his own form. And through those years, Kavalan won award after award on the world stage.
Dr. Swan died in 2017. But Ian Chang told me something quietly remarkable: he feels the doctor is still there. Watching. Making sure he doesn’t take the wrong road.
Leaving Kavalan — Letting Go of a Child
When Ian Chang left Kavalan, the distillery he had helped build from zero over 16 years, his family grieved. “My wife, my mother, even my daughters — they were all very sad,” he said. He described Kavalan as a child he had raised from zero to sixteen. Leaving that child behind, however necessary, was one of the most painful things he had done. And yet: Kavalan continued to win awards after his departure. The thing he built was truly built to last.
KOMORO: Starting from Zero, Again
After Kavalan, Ian Chang explored consulting — advising multiple distilleries rather than belonging to one. Several large deals almost materialised. One was stopped by COVID. Then KOMORO Distillery (KDI) appeared, led by CEO Shimaoka — a finance professional with a passionate dream of building a distillery in Japan.
Shimaoka did not want Ian Chang as a consultant. He wanted him as co-founder. “Join us,” he said. Ian Chang’s deeper desire — the one he hadn’t fully admitted — was exactly this: to build from zero again. KOMORO, located in a 910-metre-altitude forest in Nagano Prefecture, with its dramatic temperature swings and slow, cold-driven maturation, offered precisely that. KDI is also planning a second distillery in Hokkaido, nearly four times the capacity of KOMORO.
Planting Trees
Ian Chang’s philosophy of whisky-making is this: “Making whisky is like planting a tree. You plant it for the next generation. When the tree grows, people can enjoy its shade. What we are doing now is for people in the future.”
When he visited Glenfarclas with CEO Shimaoka, the blender let them taste a 70-year-old whisky. Ian Chang knows he will never live to taste KOMORO’s 70-year-old. But someone will. And the person who made it — 70 years ago — knew they wouldn’t see it either. That is the kind of whisky-making Ian Chang has given himself to.
Mika’s Perspective
When Ian Chang finished describing his philosophy — planting trees for the next generation — I blurted out “That’s exactly the same.” Because I say almost those same words to guests at Bar Little Happiness, every time I open a bottle of aged whisky: this is a gift from someone in the past, sent forward in time, arriving in your glass tonight.
Ian Chang looked at me and said: “That is the same as our philosophy.” Two people with entirely different roles in the whisky world, looking at the same thing.
On July 4, 2026, Ian Chang will host a special tasting event at Bar Little Happiness in Hiroshima — one of very few bar-format events he has agreed to do in Japan. KOMORO new make spirit will be poured and explained by the man who made it. It will not simply be a tasting. It will be a conversation with a whisky philosophy.
Read the original Japanese column: https://little-happiness.jp/columns/ian-chang-komoro/
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