Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
“Whisky is like planting a tree. You plant it for the next generation. When the tree grows tall, people can enjoy its shade — but those people are not you. What we are doing now is for future generations.”
Ian Chang said this over lunch at a small restaurant in Hiroshima, and I felt something shift inside me. Because it’s exactly what I tell my own customers — that every bottle of whisky is a gift sent forward in time by someone who would never taste the finished thing.
Ian Chang and I see the same landscape. We just stand in very different places.
Who Is Ian Chang?
If you drink whisky seriously, you know the name. Ian Chang spent 15 years as Master Distiller and Blender at Kavalan Distillery in Taiwan — the man most responsible for turning a brand that experts laughed at into one of the most awarded whiskies in the world.
He is now Master Blender and co-founder at KOMORO Distillery (KDI) in Nagano Prefecture, Japan — at 910 meters above sea level, surrounded by forest, with temperature swings between day and night that create a maturation environment unlike anything else in Japan.
It Began With Accident — and a Warehouse Full of Magic
Ian’s path to whisky was not planned. His father suffered a severe stroke while working in China, and Ian — then completing his military service — was called back to Taiwan to be near his family. Kavalan was 20 minutes from his home. He applied.
At the interview, he was given a series of nosing tests. He passed. Later, he came to believe his years of education in Scotland — learning to navigate British culture and communication — may have helped him stand out.
But the moment everything changed came shortly after he joined, when a senior colleague took him to Scotland — to the Glenlivet, to distilleries with pot stills gleaming in low light, to maturation warehouses where row after row of barrels sat in silence.
“It was so romantic,” he told me. “Like a fantasy world. So I decided to keep going forward and never look back.”
In that warehouse, Ian Chang fell in love with whisky.
What Jim Swan Taught Him
The defining teacher in Ian’s career was Dr. Jim Swan — the legendary Scottish whisky consultant who mentored him throughout the Kavalan years.
The first thing Jim Swan ever told him: “Whisky is a living thing, not a beverage. Unlike Coca-Cola, you can’t just take a recipe and replicate it anywhere. You have to adapt your methods to the local climate, conditions, and water.”
This single insight — that you cannot simply transplant Scottish methods to Taiwan and expect the same results — became the foundation of everything Ian built at Kavalan. It took roughly ten years of working alongside Jim Swan before Ian felt he had truly developed his own style. That same decade was the one in which Kavalan won award after award on the international stage.
Jim Swan passed away in 2017. Ian still speaks of him as someone watching over his path from above, making sure he doesn’t take the wrong road.
Leaving Kavalan: Like Saying Goodbye to a Child
When Ian left Kavalan after 15 years, I asked him what it felt like.
“It was truly sad,” he said. “Kavalan was like a baby I raised from zero to sixteen years old. My wife, my mother, even my daughters — the whole family was so sad.”
He raised it from nothing. He built the style, trained the team, created the culture — and then he left. And Kavalan continued to win prizes after he was gone. When I mentioned this, he deflected immediately: “They’re all good people. That’s why it’s stable. It wasn’t just Jim Swan — I learned alongside all my Kavalan colleagues.”
The ability to build something that sustains itself after you leave — that is a rare and extraordinary thing.
Why Komoro? Why Japan?
After Kavalan, Ian considered becoming a consultant — working with multiple distilleries, spreading his knowledge widely. Offers came in. One large company wanted him to help build a new distillery. Another deal was nearly signed when COVID arrived and ended everything.
And then Komoro found him.
“It was almost a perfect connection. For me, it was a destined encounter,” he said.
The CEO of KDI, Shimaoka-san, came from the financial world — a man with strong networks and the ability to attract investment. Ian brought the whisky knowledge and the mission of passing on what Jim Swan had taught him to the next generation.
“The CEO’s strength is that he has many connections, so investment gathers. My role is to make whisky and to nurture the next generation. Personally, I think it’s a very good combination.”
When Ian mentioned this, I said it reminded me of Torii Shinjiro and Taketsuru Masataka — the two men who founded Suntory and built Japanese whisky together. He smiled and said “that’s nice.”
As for Nagano itself — when he heard “Komoro, Nagano,” his first thought was that it was the prefecture with the longest life expectancy in Japan. A healthy lifestyle, clean air, mountain water. Then he visited, and saw the forest at 910 meters, felt the dramatic temperature swings between day and night, and understood: this was a maturation environment that would produce whisky unlike anything from the valleys below.
Planting Trees at Komoro — and Beyond
KOMORO Distillery’s new-make spirit is already striking — clean, precise, with a delicacy that surprised me when I first tasted it. That’s not an accident. It reflects the man who designed its character.
Ian is now training the next generation, including Shibuya-san — a PhD in fish immunology who had no whisky background until Ian gave him the same nosing tests he himself once took at Kavalan. Shibuya-san passed.
KDI is also planning a second, much larger distillery in Hokkaido — roughly four times the production capacity of Komoro. The seeds planted now will grow for decades.
“I can’t see a 70-year-old whisky from Komoro,” Ian said. “Even with advances in medicine, it’s impossible. So that’s for future generations to enjoy.”
He visited Glenfarclas last year with Shimaoka-san and was given a taste of a 70-year-old expression by the blender. Seventy years. Someone planted that tree long before Ian Chang was born, and now it shelters the people of this generation.
Komoro’s first bottles will shelter someone we’ll never meet. Ian already knows this, and he plants anyway.
Ian Chang visited Bar Little Happiness in Hiroshima and has hosted a special tasting event here. KOMORO Distillery bottles are available at Bar Little Happiness. Read more (in Japanese): little-happiness.jp/columns/ian-chang-komoro/
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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