Ichiro’s Malt Bottling｜Traveling Lito, 20th Anniversary
2026.8.09
For our 20th anniversary, Bar Little Happiness is releasing a bottle from Chichibu Distillery: Ichiro’s Malt & Grain 2nd Fill Bourbon Barrel “Traveling Lito.”
Here, I want to tell you why it had to be Ichiro’s Malt.
To me, there is no father of Japanese whisky today but Ichiro Akuto
I mean that seriously.
As far as I know, most of Japan’s new distilleries go to Chichibu to learn.
They are taught the craft, and the thinking behind it, and then they go home to build their own place.
I’m certain that this current is why Japanese craft whisky has become as rich as it is today.
Ichiro Akuto founded Ichiro’s Malt in 2004.
Over twenty years it has become a name that drinkers around the world follow with something close to devotion.
I first visited Chichibu Distillery in 2008 or 2009.
I’ve been back several times since.
And every time, they’ve moved forward.
It’s the same distillery, but they show me something different on every visit.
A 20th anniversary bottle needed a place where things began
In 2026, Bar Little Happiness turned twenty.
If I was going to do a private bottling to mark it, I wanted it bottled somewhere that meant something to this bar.
I’d thought that for a long time.
One was Sakurao Distillery, here in Hiroshima.
That whisky, and the ground it comes from, had to be part of our twentieth year.
(I’ve written about the Sakurao bottling here.)
A 20th anniversary bottle needed a place where things began
And there was one more place I couldn’t leave out.
The first distillery I ever took my staff to.
The place whose bottle I picked up knowing nothing, just because it was pretty, and then couldn’t put down.
It could only be Ichiro’s Malt.
Our first staff trip went to Chichibu
My full-time staff and my part-timers all came along on that trip.
Chichibu was the first distillery I ever brought anyone to.
Until then I’d always gone alone.
Back then I was desperate to bring my staff along in their craft.
How do you get someone to pass on what moved you, at the same heat you felt it?
There’s only so far words will take you.
So we go and stand there together.
Once you’ve stood where the makers work, the drink looks different to you.
These distillery trips — taking my staff, and later my guests, to see the places where the whisky is made — were a necessary step for me, part of how that feeling reaches the people at my counter.
Chichibu was the very first one.
(I’ve searched, and there are no photos from those days. I didn’t have the room in my life then to keep track of pictures.)
When I chose with nothing but instinct
Back then I didn’t really understand what single cask even meant.
I opened the bar with no experience, then moved it to a bigger place.
All I did was add more of what I liked, and more of what made my guests happy.
I had no foundation to stand on.
I couldn’t even tell what I understood and what I didn’t.
It wasn’t like now, when everything is online.
There was no one around me to ask.
I didn’t even know what to ask, or how — and meanwhile the bar just kept getting bigger.
What I had was: I love this, this is lovely, this is beautiful.
— my own instinct, and nothing else.
Even with the Card Series — fifty-four bottlings, each wearing a playing card on its label — what got me first was the artwork.
The card faces were the labels, exactly as they appear in a deck, and they were just lovely.
Then I drank one. That’s where it started.
I’d reached for it because it was pretty, and the whisky inside took me completely.
I had no words for it, but I knew this was something extraordinary.
In those days the distillery let you taste as much as you liked — unthinkable now — and the liquor shops in Chichibu still had plenty in stock.
I still remember stopping at one of those shops on the way home.
The Card Series was lined up on the shelf, I wanted it so badly, and I carried the whole lot to the register.
They told me they didn’t take credit cards.
The cash in my wallet came nowhere close.
The move to the bigger place had been paid for entirely with borrowed money.
There was no slack in my finances at all.
I gave up and went home to Hiroshima, and still couldn’t get it out of my head.
A few days later, I phoned the shop.
I explained myself, I asked, and they let me have most of what they had.
Looking back, it was an outrageous thing to ask of a stranger.
If they’d asked me why, I don’t think I could have explained.
I just wanted those bottles near me.
That much, I was clear about.
Bar Little Happiness held quite a number of the Card Series.
Deep, and full of fragrance.
Just looking at the bottles made me happy.
And we drank them, rather quickly.
To everyone who drank them back then: congratulations!
That series went on to become legend — a complete set of all 54 sold at auction in Hong Kong for ¥160 million.
I had no idea, none at all, that it would come to that.
What I’d wanted was a single cask
About this 20th anniversary bottling.
What I wanted, originally, was a single cask.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, they gave us a wonderful Malt & Grain.
2nd fill bourbon barrel.
Cask strength, 60%, limited to 216 bottles.
A slow, rounded whisky, like café au lait
If I had to put it in one line…
A whisky like café au lait — round, slow, easy on the tongue.
Cask strength at 60% makes some people brace themselves.
But the first sip is surprisingly mellow.
It is strong, though, so please take care.
On the label is Lito, the small spirit who watches over this bar.
I’ve written the story of how Lito came to be here.
“Traveling Lito” — to bars across Japan, and beyond
The bottle is called “Traveling Lito.”
I want it to set out for bars all over Japan, and all over the world.
Someone finds this bottle in a bar in a town I’ve never been to.
They talk about the whisky with the bartender across the counter.
In a place I don’t know, Lito meets someone I don’t know.
That, to me, is what traveling means.
We set aside a small allocation for our guests as well.
That allocation was for the people whose paths have crossed with this bar.
Our Hiroshima regulars, who hold this place up.
The ones who live in other prefectures and come all this way anyway.
And the ones who keep ordering from our online shop, where we decant rare bottles into small measures.
People who hold this bar as dear as I do.
Those were the hands I wanted it in.
Orders came in beyond anything we expected, and the allocation closed within 24 hours.
To everyone we couldn’t accommodate, I’m sorry.
(More 20th anniversary bottlings are coming this year — add our official LINE and watch for word!)
This bottle has another destination.
The counters of whisky bars across Japan and around the world.
Lito reaching someone neither of us has met yet.
That is what I want most.
There’s a limit to how far my own hands reach.
The one who carries it to someone in a town I’ll never visit is the bartender standing there.
So I’m placing this bottle with bars that take whisky seriously.
I want it handed over by someone who can tell the story behind the pour in their own words.
And one more thing.
A bar where people who love whisky gather.
Someone willing to tell the story, and someone who wants to hear it.
This whisky comes alive at a counter where both are present.
If you run a bar and this interests you, please send me a DM on Instagram.
Let Lito travel as far as your town.
About Yumi Yoshikawa, a brand ambassador I look up to
Yumi Yoshikawa, brand ambassador for Ichiro’s Malt.
She began as a drinker like the rest of us, and was struck by Ichiro Akuto’s thinking and philosophy.
She tended bar at the Imperial Hotel, spent time working in Scotland, and then joined Ichiro’s Malt.
In 2019 she was named Global Brand Ambassador of the Year at Whisky Magazine’s Icons of Whisky.
I once attended a brand seminar she led.
What came through was that she doesn’t hand whisky over as a product — she passes it on as culture, as community.
Taking in the founder’s intent, digesting it, carrying it out into the world.
There’s a resolve and an aesthetic that lives in the words of someone who carries that role.
Respect isn’t a big enough word for it.
This is the brand such people have protected and carried forward.
And there was me, years ago, phoning a shop full of strangers because I couldn’t bear not to have those bottles.
Some seventeen years on from that day, Ichiro’s Malt is releasing a bottle with this bar’s name on it.
I don’t have words for it!
But what I was doing that day and what I’m doing now are probably the same thing.
I loved it, so I had to have it near me.
I loved it, so I had to give it a form.
That’s all it is.
To whoever picks up this bottle
Lito set out on a journey, riding in a bottle.
From a corner of Hiroshima to bar counters across the country.
And so Lito met you.
There is a Japanese word, hitsuzen — the idea that an encounter was always going to happen. That, I think, is what this one is.
To love whisky, and to love the place a bar is.
That alone makes us travelers in the same world.
Lito left my hands and traveled to you, and there, Lito became yours alone.
Let’s keep traveling in this love of whisky together.
May you and Lito meet, someday, in some bar.
Whisky and rum taste better when you know the hearts behind them.
Every encounter is meant to be. Welcome to the world of Rum & Whisky.
📍 Bar Little Happiness
5-14-1F Nagarekawa-cho, Naka-ku, Hiroshima
Mon–Sat: 19:00–24:30 / Sun: until 24:00
(Last entry approx. 1 hour before closing)
Open almost every day of the year
Reservations and enquiries via our official LINE 🥃
🔗 Online shop: https://shop.little-happiness.jp/
