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…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles When I tell guests that there is a rum which appeared in a legendary Japanese manga series, their eyes light up immediately.…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles Floor malting is one of those practices that sounds simple until you understand what it involves. Barley is soaked, then spread across…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles There are a small number of distilleries where you feel, within minutes of arriving, that the building knows something you do not.…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles I have visited a lot of distilleries. Cardrona is the only one where I found myself surrounded by flowers before I had…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles There is a sentence that, once you hear it, makes Asaka Distillery impossible to forget. It was spoken by the founder of…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles One of the most clarifying things I heard at the 2026 Komoro Whisky Festival came not from the main stage but from…
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,…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles By the time we reached the fourth and final part of my conversations with Inoue-san during my visit to LAODI Distillery in…
Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles In 2016, Vientiane hosted the ASEAN summit. For Laos — a country that carries deep historical wounds from the most heavily bombed…