Sakurao Single Cask｜A First for the Distillery, and How Lito Was Born
2026.8.14
For our 20th anniversary, Bar Little Happiness is releasing a bottle from Sakurao Distillery: Sakurao Single Cask, 100% Japanese Malt, 1st Fill Bourbon Barrel — “Traveling Lito.”
On the label is a character belonging to this bar.
Its name is Lito.
Lito is the small spirit who watches over Bar Little Happiness.
How this cask was chosen.
How Lito came to be.
Two stories that ran alongside each other on the way to our twentieth year.
The day I drove out to Sakurao Distillery
It should have been warming up by then, but that day was cold.
The whole way from Hiroshima to Sakurao, I couldn’t settle. My heart wouldn’t slow down.
I’d made that trip many times, and only that day did it look different.
Bar Little Happiness’s twentieth year. It was the day we would choose the cask.
A single cask for a bar — a first for Sakurao Distillery
Sakurao Distillery had never once bottled a single cask for a particular bar.
I had asked many times over the years, and been turned down every time.
I couldn’t let it go, because that whisky and that ground had to be part of our twentieth year.
And this time, they opened a door they had never opened before — a single cask bottling for a bar — and they opened it for us.
They crossed a line they had held for years.
I felt enormously grateful, and I wanted, more than anything, for Sakurao to end up glad they gave this cask to us.
Nine samples
When I arrived, nine cask samples were lined up waiting.
Several from Sakurao, several from Togouchi.
The nose had nearly decided it for me
On the nose alone, I nearly had my answer.
Sakurao, 100% Japanese malt, 1st fill bourbon barrel.
A bourbon barrel — the most ordinary maturation cask in the world.
“If it were just the nose, this would be decided. Before I’d even tasted it.”
I said it before I could stop myself.
And still, the Togouchi Islay pulled at me
I’d nearly decided, and then I looked at the other specs and started wavering.
The Togouchi Islay cask finish wouldn’t leave my head.
An Islay cask from a Hiroshima distillery —
People in the trade would react to that combination. I was sure of it.
A bottle people would talk about.
The kind of cask a whisky bar puts out for the malt obsessives.
The truth is, I wanted to bottle both — the Sakurao and the Togouchi.
I did say so.
But two simply wasn’t possible.
So it would be one, and even that was a rare thing to be given.
I stopped asking for more.
What passed through my head over three hours
The Sakurao bourbon barrel, or the Togouchi Islay cask.
I went back and forth for three hours.
While I wavered, Fujino-san and I talked — about the whisky trade, about where Sakurao is heading, about nothing much at all — and I tasted again, and again.
“Take as long as you like.”
He said that, and he genuinely never once hurried me.
I’ll be honest: the whole time I was thinking what a nuisance I was being, how sorry I felt.
Three hours of someone’s day. By any normal measure, that’s rude.
But as we talked, faces from twenty years kept surfacing in my head and going under again.
Guests enjoying whisky at this counter.
The people who stood behind it with me as staff.
Makers at distilleries around the world who gave me their time.
The liquor merchants I trust, who sent good bottles our way.
How would that person feel about this bottle?
What would that guest say?
Those voices crossed each other in my head.
I think half of me was talking to Fujino-san, and the other half was in conversation with twenty years of faces.
“This one.”
I went back to that first nose.
In the end it was the cask that had struck me first.
Looking back, those three hours were necessary.
(Fujino-san, I’m sorry for putting you through it 🙏)
Because I properly agonised there, because I had the time to picture twenty years of faces one by one, I’ve never once since thought I should have chosen the other one.
And then, Lito
About a year before this cask was chosen, another story had already started moving in me.
What if this bar had a guardian you could actually see?
I wanted twenty years of feeling to take a shape you could look at.
Something that sits at the end of the counter, that travels with me, that turns up on a bottle —
something like a charm.
I only started thinking that way because, after running almost without a break since I opened, I finally had time to stand still.
Standing still, looking back over the years I’d spent with this bar, the thought simply arrived.
First I wrote a story, and decided to open it up as a design competition.
A guardian for this bar needed more than a design. It needed a story.
In a corner of Hiroshima, a small bar has kept its light on for twenty years.
One day the owner spilled a glass of whisky.
She went to wipe it, but the amber drop had already soaked into the counter, and there it slept, inside time.
Some years later.
That drop had drunk in everything the owner felt, the hours spent with her guests, the words and feelings exchanged in that room — and it rose up in the shape of a small spirit.
Lito doesn’t speak.
Lito simply watches from the end of the counter, and now and then sets off travelling, and comes home carrying a new story.
Lito is what this bar feels, made flesh — a charm that keeps watch over the bar’s memory and its future.
Spilling the whisky.
Not being perfect.
And building the days up anyway.
This ground, Hiroshima.
Going, and coming home.
All of it was exactly what these twenty years have been.
I attached that story to the brief, and put the competition out.
120 entries in ten days
Ten days after the competition opened, 120 designs had come in.
They had all read the same story, and completely different Litos kept arriving.
One person’s Lito was round and soft. Another’s had sharper edges.
One gave Lito a pronounced maple-leaf tail. Another pushed the heart shape to the front.
One story I had written came to life 120 different ways, in 120 pairs of hands.
I chose the design by the person who had read deepest into my story, and Lito was born.
Lito arrives
Then began the work of pinning down every detail.
Back and forth with the designer, putting meaning into each part, one at a time.
“Could this go like this.”
“I want this feeling to show here.”
— and with each round of notes, Lito’s outline rose a little further out of the page.
Twenty years of feeling ran past me all at once.
At 22, opening in a corner of a car park, a few square metres serving coffee.
Meeting my first whisky, Balvenie.
All the staff who stood at the counter with me over the years, and everything I grew into by knocking against them.
The faces of guests who came, one and then another.
The makers I met at distilleries around the world.
/
I sent design notes with tears I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t explain to myself why I was crying.
Only the feeling of something rising up out of somewhere deep.
/
What went into Lito’s design
The feelings that ran past me never became words.
So I put clear meaning into each part of Lito instead.
The heart on Lito’s face is the shape of this bar’s window.
Back then I drew that heart by hand, laid it over the window, and cut it out.
And the way it isn’t quite straight.
I couldn’t get it perfect, and that stands for days built up in earnest.
The horn-like points on Lito’s head are pot stills.
The shape of the stills that bring whisky and rum into being.
The wavering lines around the face are feeling in motion.
Countless feelings exchanged across twenty years behind this counter.
Joy, grief, meeting, parting, being moved —
all of that motion swirls around Lito’s face in waves.
The round body is the bar’s own history — the roundness of twenty years stacked up.
The maple leaf on Lito’s chest is the momiji that stands for Hiroshima.
A mark for carrying home whatever the travels gave.
Lito’s face is a little crooked, a little strange, a little wistful.
Everything these twenty years have been is cut into Lito as shape.
And the feelings that never became words are sleeping inside.
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.
About this bottle
Sakurao Single Cask, 100% Japanese Malt, 1st Fill Bourbon Barrel
Bar Little Happiness 20th Anniversary Bottling — “Traveling Lito”
Cask strength, 62%
Limited to 171 bottles
Not sold to the general public. Available only through bars across Japan.
Related post 🔗
📍 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/
About the author
Mika Tanimoto — President, Little.m Inc. / owner-bartender
Owner of Bar Little Happiness, a rum and whisky bar in Hiroshima now in its twentieth year.
She visits distilleries around the world, and what she shares comes first-hand, from talking directly with the people who make the spirits.
