When you talk to people outside of the drinks industry, the view that keeps surfacing whenever the topic of distillery tourism comes up goes something like this. Someone has visited a couple distilleries — different brands, different locations, different ranges.
But in the second visit they kind of stopped paying attention. The copper still. The botanical display. The origin story about the founders who quit their jobs. The tasting flight. The gift shop on the way out. Fun but similar.
Once you’ve seen one, they say, you’ve seen them all.
It’s a verdict worth taking seriously and one while i don’t agree with it – the feeling of being bored by sameness is something that I’ve experienced several times first-hand.
That said, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Joining a group foraging on the High Coast of Sweden, smelling meadowsweet in the wild, watching beekeepers at work, and then tasting Hernö Old Tom gin while basking in golden light reflected off their stills is etched into my memory in a way that no tasting note ever will be.
Brookies Gin tastes different when you have just spent an hour walking through the rainforest around Byron Bay distillery where its ingredients grow. The liquid and the landscape become the same thing.
Hendrick’s will forever be more Scottish to me than it presents itself as, because of time spent at the distillery on the Ayrshire coast. The gin didn’t change. My picture of it did.
Some of the windows in Plymouth Gin’s distillery are now practically at knee height. The street outside was several feet lower when the stills were first commissioned, three centuries ago. You don’t need a tour guide to tell you how long this place has been here. The architecture says it.
This is what distillery tourism can do at its best. Not educate. Not sell. Reframe.
The wrong question in tourism
What I object to most is that far too much distillery tourism answers the question nobody came to ask.
The question being answered in the majority of visits I’ve experienced, is: how is this spirit made? The still room tour. The botanical maceration explanation. The “Juniper is the soul of gin” spiel. Instructive, but largely identical in format and delivery from one distillery to the next.
The question visitors actually arrive with is different. Why does this distillery exist? Why does this gin taste the way it does? And why should this place matter to me?
The how is generic. Every producer shares the bulk of their processes with the next. Differentiation lives in the why — in what makes the team, the approach, the land, or the spirit genuinely distinct from everything else with a botanical label on it.
Andreina Dunne, Global Communications Manager at Maison Ferrand — the house behind Citadelle, the world’s first commercially produced French gin — explains what makes the difference.
The visitor experience at Château de Bonbonnet deliberately begins outside, in the juniper fields that surround the estate and the orangery of citrus and aromatic plants grown there. The location is central to the experience.
By the time guests reach a glass, they have walked through the raw ingredients. Explaining the brand’s progressive infusion process thereafter (where 19 botanicals are each added at a specific moment and temperature), merely amplifies the understanding further.
When guests experience that explanation surrounded by the very ingredients being described, something clicks. They don’t just understand it intellectually. They feel it. — Andreina Dunne, Maison Ferrand
That shift, from passive tasting to something visceral is what a great experience unlocks.
More so when the liquid itself is built to reflect its provenance. Take Citadelle’s Jardin d’Été for example, with that juicy hit of melon rind and pop of citrus upfront before piny spruce tree-like juniper drives through the senses. It is so reminiscent of the region’s warmth in summer that the château visit doesn’t explain the gin so much as confirm it. The place and the liquid are telling the same story.
The true test worth applying
Owner-led tours — no script, stories that go off-piste because the person telling them was actually there — produce a quality of engagement that no trained guide can replicate. Niall Macalister Hall at Beinn an Tuirc, the distillery behind Kintyre Gin on a working hydro-powered estate on Scotland’s west coast, does this deliberately.
Folk like to hear from the owners. It gives them a bit more insight — and they’re more likely to buy products after the tour. – Niall Macalister Hall, Beinn an Tuirc Distillers.
When the commercial reward and the human instinct point in the same direction, that’s usually a sign someone is doing something right. It’s also craft’s advantage over multinational corporations. Most distilleries are less than 20 years old and have founders at the heart of their day to day business.
They are often the irreplaceable, un-replicable point of differentiation.
The test I’d apply to any visitor experience is equally simple: could this exist anywhere else? If yes, it’s worth redesigning and however the point of difference comes – be it through a sense of place, or because of the people, or because of the stories shared or something else entirely – double down on it.
The tourism amplifier trap
Having something genuine to say and doing it in a way that is felt and not just told, is only half the equation. The other half is making the business model work.
This is where distilleries that open their doors with real conviction can still run into serious trouble.
Tourism isn’t a fast track to visibility or revenue. It’s an amplifier. Everything that’s already working gets louder. Everything that isn’t gets louder too. That includes the costs.
Take The Lakes Distillery for example. It wasn’t short of visitors. Their product range is credible, the location beautiful, the experience was well-executed. But a café, a restaurant, and a substantial rural site carry fixed costs requiring a very specific volume of throughput — and that volume is hard to sustain year-round. The business model didn’t work, and they are now closed to the public.
Meanwhile, Manchester Gin operated from the heart of a city with a good cocktail bar and an embedded venue within the city’s hospitality offerings. Same outcome: when costs outweigh income consistently enough, no amount of footfall fixes it.
Getting the economics right
Cotswolds Distillery reporting significant portions of revenue at DTC margins from tourism is what success looks like. But Cotswolds sits a stone’s throw from Blenheim Palace, one of England’s most visited heritage sites and a venue that typically welcomes nearly one million visitors annually.
The location does the commercial work before a single tour is booked. Most distilleries opening visitor centres are not starting from that position, and many underestimate how much that matters.
The distilleries that make tourism work have a product with commercial traction, a community with a genuine relationship to the brand, a location with some natural pull 365 days a year, and a cost base that realistic visitor numbers can support.
The Everglow UK Distilling Census shows the gap clearly.
In the UK, tourism contributes more than 25% of income for a quarter of distillery sites. Yet, 63% host fewer than 1,000 visitors a year.
The infrastructure is largely in place across the sector — 60% run bookable tours, 55% allow walk-in tastings, nearly half have bars or retail on site.
Distilleries have built the supply side. The execution gap is in making it pay while scaling it all up — and that gap is wider than most care to admit.
The payoff of doing it differently
The numbers behind Scotch whisky tourism are often quoted when producers talk of a success story. 2.7 million visits in 2024, collectively the most popular tourist attraction in Scotland, more than £85 million spent across five regions. But that reflects decades of political and national investment — more than £500 million in infrastructure over two decades — that gin as a borderless, international category cannot replicate.
Scotch, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and the emerging Irish distillery circuit are each made possible because of their shared geography not category type.
For example, Bombay Sapphire and Four Pillars are the only two gin producers in the world who host over 100,000 visitors a year. It’s hard to see what centralised infrastructure or campaign could meaningfully serve both.
Regional tourism success is built on place. Gin doesn’t have a place at category level – it has producers.
Furthermore, look more closely: half a dozen Scotch distilleries closed their visitor centres in the past year. There’s a reason for that.
The format — production tour, tasting flight, retail — has become so consistent that the uncommitted visitor increasingly finds going to a second distillery is much like going to the first. So why bother.
The sector built scale, then discovered that scale and sameness are hard to separate.
What wine tourism gets right
Wine tourism in the UK tells a more useful story. According to the WineGB Tourism Report 2024, visitor numbers reached 1.5 million in 2023, up 55% on 2022. Wine tourism now contributes 25% of total vineyard income. 60% of producers expect further significant growth within five years.
The difference isn’t more elaborate experiences — it’s that wine tourism is anchored in place rather than production. A winery visit is about walking through the vines, eating on the estate, understanding a specific landscape.
It answers the question visitors actually came with. Because the experience is built around something irreducibly specific to each estate, it can’t easily be replicated down the road.
Gin has exactly this available to it. The botanical identity of a spirit — the specific ingredients, their provenance, the decisions behind them — is as place-specific as any terroir argument.
Making gin is an act of creation marrying concept, ingredient, and occasion into something drinkable. That’s a richer story than any still room tour tends to tell.
That 25% of vineyard income figure is the commercial target worth aiming at too. All markets are experiencing pressure and wholesale margins are being compressed. Add to that the contraction in the on-trade and full-margin direct sales to a visitor who arrived already interested is increasingly the difference between a distillery that sustains itself and one that doesn’t.
Effort as brand strategy
Remote geography, for most teams, is a logistics problem. For the right distillery, it’s a strategic marketing asset.
Getting to the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast involves a small aircraft, a helicopter, or a seasonal passenger ferry — all subject to weather cancellation, all relatively expensive. Arthur Miller, co-founder of Scilly Spirit with his wife Hilary, is matter-of-fact about what this produces:
The challenges — and cost — of getting here do play a part in visitors wanting to ensure they have great experiences, almost to justify all the effort. When they do have great experiences, they are keen and prepared to vocalise that through reviews. – Arthur Miller, Scilly Spirit.
There’s an unintended commercial consequence too.
The difficulty of reaching the islands has naturally selected for a more affluent visitor base — a good fit for a super-premium gin. The remoteness created the audience the brand needed without any deliberate targeting.
Engineering for remoteness, not against it
Kyrö Distillery, founded in a sauna in rural Finland in 2012, faces the same equation. They are based in Isokyrö, a town of 5,000 people accessible by a two-hour drive through rye fields. The distillery doesn’t try to solve the remoteness. It engineers for it.
Kyröfest, their annual summer festival, is expanding to two days in 2025. The logic: a single-day visit cannot justify an international flight. Two days can. The programme is built for visitors who have already made the effort to get there. What awaits them reflects that commitment:
Distillery tour with a local guide, extensive tastings, shared social food dinner with great cocktails, sipping a G&T in a hot tub under the stars or even the northern lights and maybe a dip in the river Kyrö. – Mikko Koskinen, Kyrö Distillery.
The visitor who made an effort to get to you is a different commercial proposition from the one who walked in because you were nearby. Not necessarily more knowledgeable — but more committed.
And commitment, when an experience delivers on it, converts to the strongest kind of advocacy.
The locals test
For those in more reachable locations, here’s the question I’d ask any distillery serious about building tourism as a commercial channel. Not how many visitors did you have last summer. Who is filling your spaces mid-week, off-season, on grey November afternoons?
The answer tells you whether you’ve built a brand showcase or a community hub.
A brand showcase draws people who had a reason to seek you out — gin enthusiasts, passing tourists. It can be excellent. But it peaks sharply in season and goes quiet when the tourists leave.
A community hub serves the people who live nearby as much as those who travel. It has regulars. When tourist season ends it doesn’t close, it just changes gear. Those locals fill the café on a Tuesday morning for a coffee and chat. They give the operation a rhythm that doesn’t collapse in October.
Niall’s experience at Torrisdale is instructive. When the estate café opened, it was branded as the distillery café:
We thought it perhaps turned people away — families, perhaps, as there was a perception that alcohol was involved. So we have shifted that, and now it is very much an estate experience, of which the distillery is one feature amongst several. – Niall Macalister Hall, Beinn an Tuirc Distillers.
The estate now produces apple brandy and mistelle from its own orchards, with cider in development and apple juice planned — so everyone can get involved. An experience accessible to non-drinkers and families serves the local community, not just tourists who came for gin.
Around 7,000 people visit annually and the repeat dynamic is working: day visitors return for overnight breaks; overnight guests come back for longer holidays.
When the venue isn’t the answer
Not every distillery can build its brand around the visitor experience and it’s worth being clear about how the venue serves the brand — and not the other way around.
Tanglin Gin, operating from Dempsey Hill in a former British military barracks, has the Gin Jungle bar and a working distillery at its heart. But co-founder Charlie van Eeden is understands the tension that can emerge:
Running a high-touch venue and building a gin brand are two different businesses that pull in different directions. Our ambition isn’t to be a charming distillery people visit once. We want Tanglin to be the default gin for Asia. That is a back-bar game, not a venue game — the distillery provides the home, but the distribution is the brand. – Charlie van Eeden, Tanglin Gin.
It’s an important counterpoint and one I’ve seen first-hand working on Republic of Fremantle in Western Australia.
A visitor experience earns its place commercially: cashflow security, a direct DTC link, and connection to the local community. But the venue must serve the brand. It doesn’t replace it, especially if there are aspirations to build awareness at national or international level.
There’s also another valuable gain that open door distilleries have. In markets where craft distilling is less established, the distillery visit builds credibility with local sceptics who assume local production means a compromise in quality. I’ve seen the shift in attitude in Ethiopia when local trade visited the distillery we built. Tanglin has also lived this directly:
The real work was convincing Singaporeans that a gin made right here could actually be world-class. It took a lot of time to overcome that initial scepticism and prove that local production doesn’t mean a compromise in quality. Charlie van Eeden, Tanglin Gin.
When visitors do the work
The most commercially important thing about a distillery visitor isn’t what they spend in the shop. It’s what they do after they leave.
Arthur Miller at Scilly Spirit has the clearest evidence of this I’ve encountered. Two Italian visitors attended a Scilly Spirit tour and subsequently promoted the gin to the drinks buyer at the supermarket chain where they both worked in management. That conversation led to listings across all 20 stores in northern Italy, still in place two and a half years later.
A Norwegian group of four visited and made an introduction to a Norwegian distributor, with a first full pallet order in progress. An area manager from St Austell Brewery visited the island pub, organised a tutored tasting for her regional team, and months later connected Arthur with the brewery’s drinks buyer — a listing across all 44 managed pubs followed.
None of these were sales trips. They were visitors who had an experience worth sharing. All distillery owners know this and whether it’s deliberate hosting of trade contacts or fortuitous visitors – it’s why hosting people in situ is so valuable.
The further one encounters a brand from its home market, the more condensed the communication around it. What is missed is the richness and nuance we’ve built in a very short time — there is always a reason behind the taste, the manufacturing process, the design and storytelling. – Mikko Koskinen, Kyrö Distillery.
The door that was already open
Citadelle also understood this long before its visitor centre opened in April 2024. Before general visitors arrived, Château de Bonbonnet was already welcoming more than 500 trade professionals a year — bartenders, sommeliers, distributors, partners. Andreina Dunne describes what had been building for nearly three decades:
Many of them still talk about evenings spent around a côte de bœuf cooked over a wood fire in the château kitchen, which is, above all, a home. Andreina Dunne, Maison Ferrand.
The visitor centre didn’t create this function. It formalised it. The door was already doing strategic work. In 2024, it was widened.
The system around tourism matters as much as the visitor
The bottle taken from the boutique, Andreina notes, is not an afterthought. It’s the continuation of the experience and it’s key that a visit doesn’t end at the gate. What sustains the commercial return is what gets built around it.
Arthur Miller at Scilly Spirit has built this instinctively. Their 7,500-strong email database is built directly through every season. They host annual tutored tastings for trade staff across the island’s venues — so that when a visitor asks a bar person what to drink, the answer is informed. Island delivery rounds in a branded electric van. Cellar door pricing. A bottle refill scheme for residents that keeps the distillery present in daily island life long after the tourist season ends.
Each element feeds the others. The visitor experience builds the database. The database drives direct orders and sustains revenue through winter. The trade tastings mean the gin is recommended confidently in venues, which brings more visitors to the distillery. The refill scheme keeps locals engaged year-round, and locals are the most consistent advocates when visitors arrive.
Unlike many businesses here, winter is absolutely not a downtime for us — no shutting down the hatches. It is in fact our busiest period. – Arthur Miller, Scilly Spirit.
Slow tourism and what comes next
The most interesting thinking in distillery tourism right now is happening at the edges — in conversations about slow tourism, transformational travel, and what it means for a distillery to contribute to its landscape rather than simply draw from it.
Slow tourism means fewer visitors, longer stays, more meaningful engagement, and greater revenue per visit.
Kyrö’s guesthouse sleeps ten. Guests share dinner, use the sauna, take a dip in the river Kyrö. The physical space carries the brand into every detail — custom wallpapers depicting local botanicals, door handles cast with the company seal.
Staying overnight allows you to take in the Kyrö brand in hospitality form and enjoy the attention to detail we have put into the brand and experience. – Mikko Koskinen, Kyrö Distillery.
Beinn an Tuirc’s eco-bothies at Torrisdale make the distillery a reason to stay in Kintyre, not just something to do while you’re there. Meanwhile, Citadelle’s offering is a reminder that hospitality is both a term and a philosophy.
When we talk about ‘opening to the public,’it wasn’t really a decision born of a single moment. It felt entirely natural — simply an extension of what we have always done: sharing, explaining, passing something on, and living genuine, unhurried moments with people who care about what’s in the glass. – Andreina Dunne, Maison Ferrand.
The regenerative opportunity
Transformational travel — experiences that genuinely change something in the visitor — is a global market estimated at more than $200 billion. Gin, as a spirit built on creativity and so malleable to place, people, and culture, is uniquely positioned to engage with it.
Gin can be the vehicle to connect spirits to regeneration projects and the type of activity that’s so central to transformational travel: leaving the landscape better than you found it.
You could join the Mermaid Gin team on the Isle of Wight to restore seagrass meadows and forage samphire before a G&T. Help plant juniper seedlings in Patagonia with Bosque Gin or learn about native crafts, plants and communities in the Amazon via the team at Canaima.
These aren’t abstract ideas. They follow naturally from the community embeddedness principle the best operations already live by. A distillery that contributes to its landscape creates a relationship with place that no brand investment can manufacture.
What an open distillery door can do
The distilleries in this article sit on opposite ends of almost every spectrum. A Finnish countryside guesthouse and a Singapore jungle bar. An isolated island and a French château in the heart of Cognac. A Scottish estate powered by its own water supply.
Different scales, different geographies, different commercial models, different reasons people make the journey.
What they share is a decision. To understand that the physical presence of the brand — the place where the gin is made, the people who make it, the landscape it comes from — is a powerful communication tool. Not the label. Not the listing, nor the algorithm. The door.
The memories that stay with you from a great distillery visit aren’t the ones the brand planned. They’re drinks on the beach in a Cornish seaside town after a day at Tarquin’s, or watching waves batter Ailsa Craig on the horizon of Hendrick’s gin palace, or foraging for the perfect spruce tips on Mount Lebanon for Rayfoun distillery, or the loudmouth New York delivery guys on making a racket outside NY Distilling.
There is a moment something clicks and when the liquid stops being a product and starts being a place.
That’s not something you can put on a shelf. It’s not something a distributor can carry into a market. It’s not something a social media campaign can manufacture. It happens in person, between the person who made something and the person who tries it, in the place it came from.
Every craft distillery has this available to them. Not every craft distillery has decided what to do with it, yet.
The ones that have are building audiences that don’t just recognise the brand — they belong to it. They come back. They bring people and they walk into bars in northern Italy and Norway and the south west of England and tell someone who buys gin for a living about a place they’ve been.
That’s what the door can do. Open it properly, and it does the work everywhere else.
