There are more gin makers from diaspora communities than ever, who are building brands around a culture or place they aren’t distilling in. An Indian-inspired gin made in Cork. A South East Asian-inspired gin made in North England. A Peruvian-inspired gin built by a Brit who fell into pisco by happenstance.
You’ll find it all over the world and come across some of the most interesting and weird fusions imaginable. Founders making Latin or Mexican-inspired gins, to Asian melanges to Italian-Lebanese hybrids. Same goes in Australia, where Mediterranean heritage is a thread many founders draw into their gins as a direct reflection of who they are and where their families came from.
This isn’t a handful of outliers either. I could name dozens. Put them all together and a pattern emerges fast enough that the category needs better language for it than it currently has.
And in the gap where the language should be, the harder conversations about authenticity, value, and representation keep getting brushed over.
How does the term Diaspora work in the context of Gin and who qualifies for it?
Let’s get the definition right before anything else, because “diaspora” gets thrown around loosely. Even more so in marketing. And that looseness is most of the problem.
Diaspora, in the sense this report uses it, means people living outside the place their heritage or ancestry connects them to. Diaspora gin, then, is gin built around the culture, ingredients or identity of a place that isn’t where the spirit is distilled, made by founders who carry a real, inherited connection to that place. Family. Blood. Language. A childhood spent there, or shaped by someone who lived it.
That might sound niche until you realise dozens of gins share the same thread. And that dozens more have highly tenuous claims similar to it, which are worth questioning.
The distinction is important because most contemporary gin makers look beyond their borders for botanical inspiration. That doesn’t need to be justified. It can simply be an act of creation, a flavour decision, or an expression of somewhere admired.
However, the moment that choice gets framed as personal connection to a culture, geography stops being inspiration and becomes identity. Who gets to represent that place becomes a real question.
The decisions diaspora founders make in public — about what they are and aren’t, what they’re allowed to claim and why — are the same decisions the entire gin industry makes in private. Diaspora gin just makes them visible. I think it is the sharpest possible lens on a question the category has been avoiding: who gets to tell the story of a place, and what does it actually take to do it honestly?
It matters because it sits at the centre of any serious conversation about provenance. And it matters now, because this category ought to have better answers on it given the global explosion of gins over the past decade.
While researching this piece as a follow-up to an earlier piece on provenance in gin (more on that here: Of Somewhere), I had far more off-the-record conversations than on-the-record ones or answers sent back.
There are many founders who fear a backlash, or fear looking like they’re calling other brands out as “inauthentic”. Thankfully, three founders agreed to have it with me, at length, in their own words. This report is built around them, but note that my views are my own, not theirs, and have been formed by speaking to many about the subject – not just those featured.
Sherwin Acebuche, Tarsier: “That tension is where the magic sits”
Tarsier Gin is distilled in North England. Its cultural heart is the Philippines and Southeast Asia more broadly. Co-founder Sherwin Acebuche has never tried to pretend those two facts sit comfortably together, because in his telling, the discomfort is the whole point.
“Tarsier has always lived in the space between. We distil in the UK, but we’ve never set out to make a ‘British gin’ in the traditional sense. The intent from day one was to bottle the flavours, energy and chaos of Southeast Asia.”
“We’re not trying to neatly fit into a category. The identity is hybrid by nature, just like us, as two founders of British and Filipino origin respectively. Tarsier is British craft meets Southeast Asian soul. And actually, that tension is where the magic sits.”
I agree, and there’s something i’ve noticed about the tension while watching their journey. Brands navigating two identities don’t always hold them at once from the start. It’s easy to lean on whichever half does the most work in front of whoever’s listening. In this case, British when the room wants reassurance of quality, Southeast Asian when the room wants something that feels new.
What’s notable about Tarsier now is that they’re doing the trade-off less and less often compared to their early days. They are more confident now, standing in both at the same time, on a domestic stage and an export one, and letting the tension itself be the pitch rather than picking whichever half sells better that day.
“There’s definitely a tension but we’ve come to see it as a strength rather than something to resolve. The UK gives us the tools and prestige: distilling expertise, consistency, and a globally recognised benchmark for gin. That foundation matters. But the Philippines and Southeast Asia give us the why.”
It’s the part that can’t be faked, and the part that gets tested hardest the moment the gin leaves a market that doesn’t know any better.
“In the UK, people are discovering Southeast Asian flavours through Tarsier. It feels new, exciting, experiential. In Manila or Singapore, it’s not discovery, it’s recognition and representation. People know what calamansi should taste like. They understand the nuance of Oriental Beauty Oolong Tea, Kampot Pepper and Galangal. So the bar is much higher. You’re not introducing something, you’re being judged against lived experience.”
And with that statement, the entire authenticity debate is compressed into two sentences.
Western markets reward novelty, and all too often, culture repackaged to be palatable on their own terms. Origin markets reward accuracy. A brand that only performs well in the first is not necessarily a brand with anything to say in the second.
Acebuche’s working principle also articulates the value-flow test I’ve come across in years of journalism in the drinks industry.
“Authenticity doesn’t come from where something is made. It comes from whether the people closest to that culture feel you’ve represented it well. You don’t earn that right through marketing. You earn it through intent, action, and consistency over time.”
Bhagya Barrett, Maharani: “Not a story we are borrowing”
Maharani Gin is made in Cork, at Rebel City Distillery. The Indian half of the brand stems from Bhagya Barrett, who grew up in Kerala. Her partner Robert brings the distilling craft. Together they’ve built something that refuses the easy version of either culture.
“At the heart of our brand is a celebration of both Irish and Indian heritage. As an Irish Indian couple crafting our spirits together in Cork, it was important that our work reflected both cultures in an honest and meaningful way, with Bhagya bringing the Indian influence and Robert bringing the craft distillation expertise.”
Where a less confident brand might treat the distance between Kerala and Cork as something to work around, Barrett does the opposite.
“We do not see the distance between cultural origin and production as a tension, but as a strength. It reflects who we are.”
She goes further, drawing a line between Cork and Kerala that’s more thoughtful than it has any obligation to be.
“Cork, known as the Rebel County, shares a similar spirit with Kerala, India. Both places have strong identities, resilience, and a quiet sense of defiance, which really resonated with us.”
The botanicals aren’t decorative either. Pomelo, cardamom, cassia bark, nutmeg and mace — the last two of which Barrett describes as “non-negotiable” — sourced through a female-run spice cooperative called Vanamoolika in Kerala. That sourcing decision traces back to her own childhood around Kudumbashree, Kerala’s state-run poverty eradication and women’s empowerment mission.
“Sourcing for us was never just about cost, but about creating a positive impact within the community.”
The nutmeg has its own story, and it’s the kind of detail that can’t be focus-grouped into existence either.
“They are inspired by Bhagya’s childhood in Kerala. She has fond memories of visiting a neighbour’s house to watch television, climbing the nutmeg tree outside, and bringing it home, where her mother would use it in everyday cooking. In many ways, the bottle is a collection of memories.”
Robert’s point speaks directly to the part that’s easy to miss about diaspora gin done well. It isn’t simply a bridge between two cultures, a Venn diagram with gin sitting in the overlap. It’s memory, carried and translated.
What the Barretts are bottling isn’t Kerala as it exists today. It’s Kerala as Bhagya remembers it, filtered through a childhood, a neighbour’s nutmeg tree, a mother’s kitchen. That’s a different thing entirely, and arguably a more honest one.
I’ve noticed the same with others too. The distance the makers have from the location is the very thing that makes the perspective possible. It is hard to see a place with that kind of clarity from inside it. It takes standing somewhere else, looking back, to know exactly which details carry the weight of home and which don’t.
That’s not someone making something that resembles home. That’s someone bringing home with them, distilled down to what actually mattered. In this case, literally.
On the question this entire report is built around, Barrett doesn’t hedge.
“Ultimately, our legitimacy comes from authenticity. This is not a story we are borrowing, it is a lived experience.”
And on the brand’s reception in India, she described the launch as picking up widespread organic coverage, with many people feeling a personal sense of pride in the brand’s journey. That’s not a reaction a brand without standing gets to provoke.
Alex James, London to Lima: the founder who went full circle
London to Lima began as a British diaspora made gin. It just runs the mechanism differently to the first two, which takes some unpicking to see clearly.
Tarsier and Maharani take botanicals from the place their heritage connects them to and bring them into a gin made on their current home ground.
When Alex James started distilling in Peru, he moved something less tangible. He took the idea of gin itself and planted it into pisco, Peru’s own spirit, and pushed it toward something that tasted like the Britain he’d left.
It’s the same instinct, albeit in a different currency.
“Pisco is the spirit of Peru, and gin is, in a way, the spirit of England. I had been making small amounts of pisco at home, and using that as a base for gin felt like the right approach. I didn’t want to be seen as usurping a distinctly Peruvian category.”
What travelled wasn’t a flavour. It was the concept of gin itself, transplanted into a spirit that had never carried it before. There was no established Peruvian gin scene to plug into, no Western brand template to lean on, so he built the bridge home out of the only material he had.
While James had originally gone to Peru to start an agroforestry project in the Amazon, it’s his partner Karena who carries the connection by blood, with family roots in Peru going back generations.
“Karena’s connection is clearly more rooted in family and history. Mine has been built over time, through living and working in Peru. They’re not the same, and I don’t think they need to be.”
“London to Lima fitted us and the brand for a number of reasons. We moved to Lima to start a new adventure, both Karena and I going into the unknown, although she had family roots there to follow.”
Then the brand did something almost no diaspora gin story has done elsewhere. Alex and Karena moved back to London.
Production has stayed in Peru throughout. So the gin being made today — pisco base, international and Peruvian botanicals, distilled where it always has been — is now shaped by a founding team living in the UK. And in doing so, London to Lima currently reads as a different proposition today than it once did.
Thankfully, the name holds both versions at once.
“Interestingly, you could argue it should have been Lima to London, and Peruvians sometimes do. That’s probably fair. At the start, though, we were looking at it from our own perspective, moving from London to Peru. It’s only later, after spending more years there, that we’ve also come to see it the other way round.”
He’s right, and for those looking into the idea of Provenance it raises a question worth sitting with. How much is “where the founder lives” actually doing for a brand’s authenticity, and how much does it need to keep being true?
I believe that London to Lima is the exception to what plays out for most others, and the reason is worth being precise about. The diasporic gesture here was never a personal identity claim.
Alex fused the two spirit categories together. That’s baked into the liquid and the history. It doesn’t move when he does. The concept is Gin meets Pisco and the brand is based on the link between two places best known for making each — not on where he happens to live.
Tarsier’s claim is built differently, and that’s exactly why the same test would probably break it. “We’re bringing you Southeast Asian flavours” only means something said from a distance, to an audience that doesn’t already have ready access to the real thing. Move Acebuche to Manila and the sentence stops working — not because his connection to the Philippines weakens, but because the distance the pitch depends on disappears. The same test applies to Maharani. Move Bhagya Barrett from Cork to Kerala and the brand’s entire premise, that the distance is the strength, stops being true the moment the distance closes.
The mechanism behind this is worth stating plainly: authenticity is never simply about geography. It’s about who is making the pitch, and whether their position — personal and commercial — still gives them standing to make it.
Change the owner, the founder, or the distance being sold, and the brand doesn’t just relocate. It changes shape. Some brands can absorb that, others are broken by it.
Who gets to tell the story of a place?
Three brands, three different mechanisms, the same underlying answer. What connects them isn’t where they distil, or even where their founders were born. It’s transparency about both, and a refusal to let either lens carry more weight than it actually can.
My view, having spent years judging, writing, consulting, and watching this play out over four continents, is this: production location and inherited heritage are both real factors when it comes to assessing the authenticity of a product, but neither is the whole answer.
The whole answer is harder and more behavioural than either. It’s about depth of engagement and willingness to be held accountable.
Unfortunately, the drinks industry applies those tests inconsistently, and conveniently.
If a diaspora founder making gin three thousand miles from home can build something genuinely authentic — provided they’re honest about the distance and real about the connection — then production location alone was never the trump card it’s treated as.
That means the inverse also has to be true.
A gin made in the country it takes inspiration from, but by people with no inherited connection and no particular depth of engagement to that culture, is not automatically more authentic just because the still is in the right postcode.
Diaspora made gins reveal the postcode fallacy
Nobody walks into a serious Japanese restaurant in London and demands to know which prefecture the chef grew up in before ordering. Or that the food they are eating is imported from Japan.
The culinary world made peace long ago with the idea that a genre can travel, that mastery of a cuisine isn’t revoked by geography. Critics and discerning customers know that the question worth asking is whether the cultural knowledge and care are genuinely present — not whether the building is in the right country.
Gin hasn’t quite made that peace yet, and the double standard currently operating is stark.
A diaspora-founded brand making gin miles from the culture it references gets interrogated. Rightly so. Where is it made. Who owns it. What gives them the right. And those are reasonable questions that are important to ask. The best brands have real answers to all of them.
However, an in-country brand faces almost none of that scrutiny.
The postcode provides cover. The geography closes the conversation before it starts. Nobody asks whether the founders understand the culture they’re bottling, or whether they arrived recently, liked the vibes, and started distilling.
Being made somewhere is not the same as being of it. A still in the right country doesn’t automatically produce cultural depth, nor something reflective of the place it is from. It produces a production address.
Corporations face fewer questions than individual founders. That needs to change.
Put the postcode aside for a second and look at how the same scrutiny that gets applied forensically to individual founders disappears almost entirely the moment the owner stops being an individual.
Pernod Ricard, a French conglomerate, is less Japanese than the founding team it acquired Ki No Bi Gin from. For context the co-founders Marcin Miller and Dave Croll are British, while Noriko Kakuda Croll is Japanese and her cultural standing was part of what gave the brand its legitimacy in the first place.
Yet ask a bartender which is the more authentic Japanese product Ki No Bi, or Cambridge Japanese Gin – it takes mere seconds for them to arrive at the conclusion that it’s not Cambridge. It returns to postcode as the trump card. Often the only one consulted. Very few talk about intent or understanding or flavour combinations. Fewer still compare ownership – and if they do, they tend to give the faceless corporation a pass and find it easy to write off the individual when they are not clearly part of the diaspora of that place but now living elsewhere.
This is not about those two gins and you may come to the same conclusion at the end of it having debated it at length. Which of the two is more authentic is a debate worth having. What concerns me is that it rarely is. My point is that it’s never even discussed and the fact that the nuance is not waded through is telling. Foreign made = immediately less legitimate prevails time and again as the headline. Individuals get frequent questions and harsher assessments, corporations less so.
Here’s another example. Nobody is writing reports questioning whether Diageo has the cultural standing to market Greater Than Gin or Hapusa — brands it now owns around 97% of.
Nor are there any public questions around whether a multinational conglomerate’s acquisition of an Indian craft spirit undermines the authenticity built on the original founder’s identity and local production.
For context Anand Virmani, who founded Nao Spirits and remains its CEO, is Indian and his cultural standing was never in question. But that claim now sits inside a multinational balance sheet, with decisions now running through a far more international corporate structure – and nobody seems to be asking what that means for the brand going forward.
I’m not suggesting that they don’t have the answers. I’m pointing out the huge double standard that exists between the massive interest in Diageo acquiring an Indian craft brand and the column inches written about what it signals for the market’s growth, and the lack of open discussion about what it means culturally now that Diageo owns one of most successful Indian craft brands.
It is clear that the individual diaspora founder gets asked hard questions about personal connection, lived experience, and the right to tell a story. Yet those distilling in country, or the eventual corporate acquirers get a press release and a distribution deal.
The scrutiny around what it means to be authentic must change. That all in the drinks industry need to ask far tougher questions.
If ownership is intrinsic to credibility for a diaspora gin, as this report argues it is, then the identity of the owner matters for all irrespective of where the stills are located – and at every stage of a brand’s life, not just at launch.
A brand sold to a conglomerate doesn’t just change its cap table. It changes the nature of the claim being made on its behalf. It is important to ask whether the new owner has standing to keep making it.
The postcode test was never rigorous enough. And quietly dropping any line of enquiry around ownership the moment it applies to someone with enough market power to make the question inconvenient needs to stop.
The packaging question
Once you realise that postcode alone isn’t the answer, and that ownership matters, the truth becomes simpler and more universal.
Cultural authenticity lies in how you package it.
That applies equally to a diaspora founder distilling in Manchester, long-committed European expats running a distillery in Phnom Penh, and a multinational acquiring a craft brand from its original founder.
The category you fall into matters less than the choices you make once you’re in it.
Are you making cultural decisions with genuine depth and sensitivity, or are you simplifying something complex into something sellable and calling it authentic?
Some brands get it right from the start. Others take years to find it. Some never do. But the pattern among the ones who get there is consistent: they keep asking questions. They stay accountable to the market they’re drawing from. They let that market change them.
ARC Botanical Gin is now into its second decade in the Philippines. The brand it is today bears the marks of that sustained engagement, of a relationship that the in-country audience has had the time and proximity to push back on, refine, and ultimately reflect something real. Seekers Cambodia has followed a similar arc, producing gin now that is more culturally considered and more precisely articulated than anything it launched with.
Both are better for having kept asking questions that the market they operate in will keep forcing them to answer. What does it mean to be of somewhere? How can we represent that domestically as well as carry it with us abroad?
That scrutiny is its own form of accountability. And it’s available to any brand willing to remain inside it, regardless of where they’re from.
But staying inside it isn’t straightforward. I know this from direct experience. Work I’ve been involved in on a distillery project in Ethiopia puts the same question in sharp relief. A spirit made there, by people of that place, with botanicals of that place. There’s no appropriation question on paper.
And yet the moment you start preparing that brand for export, or building digital assets for global consumption in a way that is legible to international audiences, you are making decisions. What to simplify, and what to foreground. What to leave out because it won’t land in a market that has no frame of reference for it.
Someone is doing that translation. In my case, I’m the someone who is deciding what Ethiopia looks like to a person who may never have been there before and only tastes and feels it via a gin brand they pick up in World of Duty Free in Dubai.
For others it’s the marketing team at Diageo, or the agency in London, or the advocacy team in Brooklyn. It’s hard to get right.
The fact that you’re doing it from inside the country, with local people, doesn’t automatically make those decisions easier or more honest either. It just changes who’s in the room when they’re made.
That is the real challenge when it comes to being authentic. Not whether the still is in the right postcode. Who is making the cultural choices, and whether they have the depth, the humility, and the long-term commitment to make them well.
Which brings the conversation to a brand I’ve been tracking for a while now: Bayab Gin. They are a live example of what it looks like when a brand is actively trying to work this out in public. If you don’t know it, it was founded by British-Nigerian founders, distilled in South Africa, and is building a claim across an entire continent.
The latter is what makes it such a compelling brand to observe. A pan-African proposition is genuinely harder to substantiate than a country-specific one, and Bayab know it. The baobab research investment, the B Corp certification, the explicit framing of the brand as a vehicle to invest in Africa rather than extract from it — it’s clear to see they are trying. These are the moves of a brand that understands the ‘cultural packaging’ question and is trying to answer it on the record.
Whether they’re getting it right, and how that answer evolves as the brand grows, is exactly the kind of conversation this category needs to be having openly. Not just about Bayab of course. About every brand building and figuring out how they are representing culture, geography and what being genuine looks like.
The test that actually holds
So if production location is one variable rather than the whole answer, and inherited connection is one variable rather than the whole answer, what does earn the right to tell a place’s story through gin?
The honest answer is depth and accountability, and the two are inseparable.
Depth means doing the work. Really doing it.
Knowing which botanicals grow where and why they matter to the people who use them. Understanding the food culture, the flavour expectations, the production heritage and drinking culture of the place you’re drawing from. Building supply chains that return genuine value to the communities at the source. Staying long enough to be corrected, and being changed by that correction.
Accountability means being answerable.
To the originating culture and to the diaspora community that often becomes the brand’s most vocal advocate in new markets. To trade buyers in the origin market who already know what authentic tastes like and will say so. It means not optimising the story for the Western audience while quietly hoping the originating one never looks too closely.
Neither of these has anything to do with where you were born, where the still sits, or who owns the cap table. They’re behavioural. They show up in decisions made over years, not in founding stories or press releases.
What the best makers in this space — diaspora-founded, long-committed, in-country and corporate alike — have in common is that they kept asking the question rather than assuming the answer.
They stayed inside the accountability that the market they were drawing from created for them. And they let that accountability change what they make and how they talk about it. The brands worth watching are the ones who understand that scrutiny isn’t a threat to manage. It’s the work itself.
