Flavoured gin has been written off more times than any other part of the category. Too sweet. Too gimmicky. Not really gin. You name it and it’s been accused of it.
A lot of is deserved, and some of the reasons to believe never manifested. It appears that what was first positioned as a gateway for people who didn’t like gin to get into the category never widened the funnel. It just created a subset of flavoured gin drinkers.
And now, apparently, it’s completely finished.
The data tells one story. The shelves tell another. And the distillers still working seriously in this space tell a third.
I see it slightly differently and i think that most people reading flavoured gin’s decline have been looking at the wrong thing.
They have been watching the category shrink in volume terms in markets like the UK and Spain and treating that as proof that the idea was always flawed. A lot of it was, sure, but not the whole thing.
What failed was a version of the category built on novelty, extraction, and the assumption that consumers would stay permanently excited about whatever was new.
That version deserved to collapse.
But gin overall is not that. The flavoured expressions now being absorbed into the wider category are complex, considered, and helping shape what the spirit becomes next.
If you care to look for it, you’ll see that what’s left is far more interesting than what’s gone. Perhaps you’ll even join me in feeling optimistic about it too. This report is an attempt to explain why.
What the data says about Flavoured Gin and why it’s complicated.
Let’s start with the global picture. According to IWSR data (the global leader in beverage alcohol data and insights), total flavoured gin volume fell 3% year-on-year between 2023 and 2024. That headline is accurate and it matters. But it conceals more than it reveals.
The UK declined 18% in the same period. Spain fell 13%. Those are real contractions in two of the world’s most significant gin markets, and they track with everything I see happening on shelves.
The forward-looking numbers are equally sobering: IWSR forecasts a -4% compound annual decline for UK flavoured gin to 2029, and -6% for Spain.
Then you look at the growth markets. Nigeria was up 26% year-on-year in 2024 and now represents 18% of global flavoured gin volume. Türkiye grew 10%. Ivory Coast was flat but stable.
Their forward CAGRs are striking too: Nigeria at +11%, Turkiye and Ivory Coast both at +7%.
Meanwhile, the global category CAGR to 2029 is forecast at +2%. Not spectacular, but not the death spiral the UK numbers might imply.
Volume is not the same as breadth. A market dominated by one SKU from one multinational is not a category signal. It is a distribution story.
Broader trends vs successful campaigns
Data is only as useful as the questions you ask of it, which brings me to the Nigeria caveat. It is an important one. When you dig into what is actually driving Nigerian flavoured gin volume, you are largely looking at Gordon’s Pink, Beefeater Pink and Whitley Neill Pink Grapefruit Gin.
And the growth is predominantly in one brand. Diageo are executing well in a specific market with a specific product. That is not the same thing as a highly receptive market to flavoured gin as a category with a wide array of options.
It means we should be cautious about reading Nigeria as evidence that flavoured gin is thriving globally. What it may actually be telling us is that Diageo has found an opportunity, and Diageo is very good at finding opportunities.
Compare that to the UK, where the decline is broad and real. Dozens and dozens of brands, multiple price points, multiple formats. That is a genuine category signal.
The consolidation story not typically presented next to the stats also matters here.
In January 2026, Guatemalan Spirits Group acquired Puerto de Indias, one of the category’s original founding brands, from HIG Capital. In July 2025, French spirits group La Martiniquaise-Bardinet acquired a majority stake in Warner’s Distillery.
What it tells us about flavoured gin is that the brands that scaled can still attract significant institutional interest. So while the category is contracting in places like the UK and Spain, the survivors are being bought, not abandoned.
That is a meaningfully different story to total collapse.
Flavoured Gin has a definition problem
Before we can properly understand the category, we need to acknowledge a basic problem: nobody agrees on what flavoured gin is.
IWSR classifies a gin as flavoured if flavouring has been added over and above the base flavour of the original product. In their system, gin splits into flavoured and traditional: a distinction between a high-strength gin with extra flavouring and one without. It is a working definition. It is not a complete one.
The TTB in the United States has its own framework. The EU has a different one again. Specifically, the EU does not recognise flavoured gin as a category at all. Under EU regulations there is gin, distilled gin, and London Dry. Nothing else. A strawberry-infused gin could sit in precisely the same regulatory space as a classic juniper-forward Gin.
Competitions approach it differently still.
The IWSC for example, asks producers to self-declare based on juniper predominance. A classic gin is juniper-forward. A contemporary gin has juniper in the mix but not necessarily leading. A flavoured gin is one where juniper has taken a clear back seat and there is another lead flavour.
It is a sensory-led and producer-declared classification, not a technical one. Within both contemporary and flavoured categories at competition level, you can find gins made every which way: distilled, infused, extract-based, clear, coloured, low-sugar, high-sugar. The term describes a flavour profile, not a production method because samples are assessed blind and do not come with any attached information beyond ABV.
The same bottle can be contemporary or flavoured depending on who classifies it and what framework they’re using. The confusion and terminology being used isn’t academic. It affects how we read every headline about the category.
How does this play out in the current market right now?
Hendrick’s Cabinet of Curiosities range are all distilled gins. But in terms of their taste – you could call them contemporary or flavoured depending on where you stand. Four Pillars Bloody Shiraz is a gin further infused with shiraz grapes. By the IWSR definition it is flavoured. By many people’s palate, it sits closer to contemporary.
The same is true for Inverroche Gin. If you follow the definition for how the data is compiled – two of the three are flavoured, due to having post distillation fynbos infusions. The other would be considered South African Gin. In competition terms however, they would all be contemporary offerings (even if, ironically, one is named Classic).
Meanwhile, Condesa’s Prickly Pear and Orange Blossom Gin is made with everything is distilled in. However, it is contained in pink glass and the way it is communicated leads with a specific botanical – and both make it look and sound unmistakably like a flavoured gin expression.
These are not edge cases. They are the Gin category in 2026. And the fact that we cannot draw a clean line around them is not a failure of classification.
It reflects a genuine evolution in how distillers think about flavour, about botanicals, about process and about what gin is allowed to be.
Tom Warner put one of the issues that arise from this in direct terms when we spoke. Distilleries like his do not use flavourings, they infuse real ingredients: juice-based, natural botanicals, honey.
Yet in the US, Warner’s Rhubarb Gin requires the word flavoured on the front label. That label carries many preconceptions – many of which negative – and it covers a spectrum so wide it tells the consumer almost nothing useful. Given that articulating how something is flavoured, what the underlying gin is, and how the two combine in glass are exactly where the serious craft producers differentiate, it’s a big challenge to overcome.
Every headline figure you read about flavoured gin is filtered through a classification system built for one purpose, in one context, by one organisation. The datasets are not compatible. Comparing them as though they are leads to conclusions that are, at best, incomplete.
Collapse or curation? What actually happened in the UK and Spain
UK flavoured gin volume fell 18% in a single year in 2023-24. Given it follows year on year declines – that is not a correction. That is a reckoning.
To understand it properly however, you have to go back to what the category was built on. At its peak, flavoured gin operated on novelty as its primary commercial engine. The pitch was always about what was new. A new fruit, a new colour, a new limited edition… What’s next?
When you train a consumer to be promiscuous, you should not be surprised when they move on. There was no loyalty infrastructure. There was only a flavour in a moment.
That became a structural problem. Brands that built their volume on novelty had no mechanism for retention when the novelty wore off. Nobody had been given a reason to come back to the same bottle, the same brand, the same flavour again and again.
The pitch had been so singular and so reductive that there was no story underneath it. No values, or mission. No reason to become an advocate beyond a temporary enthusiasm for a specific taste.
Tom Warner described this well. He explained that the consumer was massively over-emotional about gin at peak, and that frothiness let small brands charge sensible margins on low volumes. The years around 2017 to 2019 were extraordinary. The energy was real. But when that emotion burned off, there was nothing underneath it for many of the brands that hadn’t done the work to build depth. To help justify why the prices were what they were. The transient drinkers who had followed flavour trends moved on. To RTDs, seltzers, or whatever came next.
There was also a more straightforward quality problem.
Let’s call it for what it is. A significant proportion of what hit the market during peak NPD years was not good. The rapid cycle of new flavours, often built on concentrated extracts, artificial colourants and hidden sweeteners, meant that quality was systematically subordinated to speed and novelty.
Consumers who bought a bad bottle did not necessarily distinguish between that specific product and the category as a whole. Even the consumers who bought something they liked got bored when the flavour is so singular. Being good for a drink is different than being good for 20…
Category association is powerful in both directions.
The off-trade dynamics compounded this. Promotional pricing trained consumers into expecting a tenner off a thirty-five-pound gin. Almost a decade into this, it’s now become the only moment volume moves in grocery channels. And any brand that can’t participate in that promotional economy eventually loses those major distribution avenues.
The Slingsby Gin administration in January 2026 is the clearest recent example of what this environment does to even respected brands. Founded in 2014, Slingsby became a nationally recognised name in the UK gin space. Flavoured expressions that included blackberry, rhubarb, and marmalade were well regarded. But rising costs, difficult trading conditions, and a market that had fundamentally shifted meant they ceased trading.
That is the story playing out across several brands right now, not just one.
And yet. Not everything that grew in that era was built on sand.
The craft got buried, but it was not all bad product
There has always been a fork in the road in flavoured gin, and it was there from the beginning.
Look at the two brands that set the precedent for everything that followed. Puerto de Indias, which came to define the strawberry gin explosion, built its product adding concentrated flavourings, colourants, and sweetener into an otherwise distilled gin. Warner’s Rhubarb took real rhubarb and infused it into a distilled gin base.
Both launched at roughly the same time. Each has been enormously successful in their respective ways and, in my opinion, each were key instigators for so much of what followed.
Both operated under the same category label. However, their products were not and have never been the same thing.
That bifurcation persisted and deepened throughout the category’s growth years.
On one side, the multinational and high-volume producers refined their use of concentrated extracts and colourants. Short NPD cycles. Vivid colours. Consistent flavour wheel. Enormous scale. I lost count of the Whitley Neill SKUs. And by the time Tanqueray launched Blackberry Royale and framed it as authentic heritage, it was clear to see something had clearly broken.
On the other, serious craft producers were developing increasingly sophisticated approaches to flavour: fresh juice integration, clarification techniques, distilling with ingredients rather than infusing after, new extraction methods, smoking and maceration work that took months to perfect rather than days.
The craft evolution of flavoured gin is genuinely impressive if you look at it honestly.
What started as fruit infused into gin has become a technical discipline with real depth. There is so much understanding now about shelf stability, filtration, coagulants and so on.
And that’s why I feel that the problem was never the quality of the best producers, nor their desire to evolve and improve. The problem was indistinguishability at shelf.
A bottle of craft gin and a supermarket own-label Pink gin sat in the same fixture, the same price architecture, the same visual register. The consumer had no reliable way to know the difference. Quality got masked in category noise. It got further buried by relentless releases, and further still by the oversimplification of messaging.
Warner’s recognised this. About five years ago, when flavoured gin was close to 85% of their volume, they committed to reaching a 50/50 split with dry gin over the following years. Not because their flavoured expressions were wrong. Because they understood that the ceiling on flavoured gin as a category story had lowered, and that their dry expressions needed to carry more of the brand’s future weight. Tarquin’s Gin range has always been based on a similar principle too.
That is strategic intelligence, not retreat. They de-risked and diversified. The craft brands still here are the ones that made those kinds of calls.
The evolution we got was not the one we all expected
When flavoured gin started to face serious headwinds, the assumed upgrade path was ingredient-led. Less sugar. Real fruit. Cleaner recipes. More botanical complexity and better integration between underlying gin and named infusion. A kind of premiumisation of the flavour itself.
That happened to a certain extent. But it was not the most consequential shift.
The evolution that has actually moved the needle and that seems to have longevity is serve specificity.
What I mean by that: the most successful flavoured gin innovation of recent years has been about what its flavour does in a specific glass, in a specific context, at a specific moment.
The flavour exists in service of the serve.
Tarquin Leadbetter at Southwestern Distillery put it precisely: their Mexican Zest and Salt Gin hits the margarita occasion. Not the tequila occasion. Specifically the margarita. Gin drinkers who love margaritas. That is a very small target and a very powerful one.
The product earns its place not by being a gin with an interesting flavour, but by being the best possible ingredient for one specific cocktail. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you will know that I talk a lot about the idea of being indispensable in order to build velocity of sale. This delivers that.
What makes this more than a coincidence is that both Southwestern and the team at Four Pillars reached the same conclusion independently and within months of each other. Tarquin’s Mexican Zest and Salt from Cornwall. Four Pillars’ El Cuatro from the Yarra Valley.
Different hemispheres, same insight: the margarita occasion is large enough, and underserved by gin, that a purpose-built expression earns its place.
The serve has become the product. The flavour of Favoured Gin exists to make that serve better than anything else you could put in the glass.
This is showing up across the on-trade in ways that were not predicted when flavoured gin was primarily a consumer-led off-trade phenomenon.
A cherry negroni made with a quality cherry gin. A rhubarb spritz built around a rhubarb expression with enough tartness to hold its own against the fizz. A citrus gin functioning as a limoncello alternative in a Lemon Drop or similar format. Flavoured gins are being better pitched as bartender tools, and the trade is starting to recognise them as such.
The same logic is playing out in the espresso martini space. Nao Spirits in Goa has approached this with their coffee infused expression, No Sleep Gin. Same goes for Stranger & Sons and their Filtr edition. The espresso martini is one of the best-known cocktails in the world and a gin that belongs in that glass does not need to explain itself.
There is a core tension worth naming here however.
The singular, directional flavour that makes flavoured gin a difficult off-trade proposition is precisely what makes it a useful on-trade tool.
At home, a consumer spending thirty pounds wants versatility — a bottle that works across occasions, drinkers, moods. A gin that does one thing brilliantly is a hard sell in that context. In a bar, that same characteristic makes a bartender’s job easier. A reliable, repeatable outcome in a specific cocktail is exactly what a listing requires.
The on-trade has arrived at flavoured gin through a different door than the off-trade built it. For the brands that understand which door they’re walking through, the opportunity is real.
The inevitable rapprochement – is Flavoured Gin going to become… just gin?
There is a quiet convergence happening that nobody has formally named.
Contemporary gin has been getting more adventurous. Flavoured gin has been getting more considered. And increasingly, the way both communicate what they are is almost indistinguishable.
Gin now has countless examples of this. Here’s two examples that have made regular headlines to illustrate:
Ukiyo’s Nashi Pear Gin, launched as an M&S exclusive in early 2026, is presented as a fruit-forward product with notes of yuzu, nashi pear, and shiso leaf. It could be classified as contemporary or flavoured depending on who you ask. The brand presents it as contemporary in production, fruit-forward in profile.
Renais Gin, which features several post distillation adjustments to reach its final profile, also occupies the same ambiguous space.
It’s clear that the comms have closed in on each other and that production methods are interchangeable. Now, the question is whether these two trajectories will eventually merge into a single, broader category called something other than either flavoured or contemporary gin…
The verdict?
My instinct is that they will, but not through any deliberate reclassification. The EU is not going to introduce a regulatory framework. That moment has passed. What is more likely is that the flavoured label simply becomes less useful over time — a retail ranging tool rather than a meaningful descriptor of the liquid.
In that light, Flavoured gin as a term probably dissolves through neglect rather than resolution. Less a conscious decision, more the accumulated weight of a label that came to mean too many things to mean anything at all. I think that something like ‘modern gin’ fills the space in everyday conversation, in tastings, in the way bartenders describe what’s in the glass
For a category that has needed consolidation for years, that might be exactly the right ending.
What Flavoured Gin innovation look like in 2026?
Not all innovation in the flavoured space is the same. It is worth being direct about that.
The old model of innovation was a new flavour as news. Bang out another expression, it generates case volume because it is different and it has a launch moment, and then it fades. That model still exists.
Flavoured Gin is also still used as a way to build out ranges. It operates in a slightly different space than a flagship offering and marketing teams can justify the rationale by linking to trends. An example of this is Aviation American Gin, who launched their first flavoured expression in 2026: Cranberry and BloodOrange, positioned as a permanent addition to the portfolio. It is competently done and the brand has the distribution to move it.
But it is not an innovation in how anyone thinks about flavoured gin. It is a familiar play executed at scale. The same downsides I’ve outlined in the report so far seem to apply to it too.
Other tried and tested approaches still roll out too. Highclere Castle’s Peach Rose Gin, also launched in early 2026, leans into the estate provenance with botanicals from the castle gardens, Lady Carnarvon Rose oil, and estate-grown honey. The concept is sound. The product is connected to place. It is positioned primarily as a UK heritage export story, and it sits in territory that many brands have tried to occupy, and a path many still follow. For example – The English Heritage Spirits Collection’s Blackberry & Rosehip Gin, launched in Feb 2026 and inspired by Jacobean mansion Audley End House in Essex is almost identical in philosophy.
There is a distinction between news and innovation. A new flavour is news. A new occasion or a new cultural moment with genuine roots is innovation.
The examples worth paying attention to sit elsewhere.
Peddlers Gin’s Tanghulu Street Candy Gin, released for Chinese New Year 2026, is built on the brand’s flagship base and infused with hawthorn, Guangdong liquorice, strawberry, Buddha’s Hand citrus, and Nanjing angelica. The inspiration is tanghulu, a sugar-coated hawthorn street candy from northern China. Think – nostalgia as a botanical.
This is not a gin that will sit next to Gordon’s Pink on a Tesco shelf, and that is entirely the point. It is speaking to a community, connecting to a cultural moment, and using flavour as a vehicle for something true. Not trying to appeal to everyone. Trying to say something specific to the people for whom that truth is personal.
Meanwhile, Tarquin’s Thirsty Thursday model at Southwestern Distillery represents perhaps the most coherent approach to flavoured gin NPD currently operating in the UK. Limited edition drops, immediate community feedback, data from seven physical shops, and a process that incubates the best expressions through to trade distribution.
Tarquin Leadbetter, founder, Southwestern Distillery said of the programme “Innovation is at the heart of what we do. I make gin because I love the ability to make a unique expression of flavour — to push the boundaries, take risks. Tarquin’s will always continue to innovate and create new expressions whether the market is in growth or decline because that’s what we love to do. This unique feedback loop enables our team to incubate the best gins and back the winners.”
Hyper provenance is where Flavoured Gin is at its best.
There is a version of flavoured gin that I find genuinely compelling, and it is the version where the flavour is inseparable from the place.
Not local botanicals as a marketing claim. Not provenance as a story pasted onto a label. But a product where the ingredient is so specific to its geography that the gin cannot exist without that connection.
It’s true of all good contemporary gins too. The flavour tells you exactly where it comes from and you cannot imagine it coming from anywhere else.
Warner’s farm-grown approach is a clear UK example of this. The rhubarb is grown on their farm. The botanicals come from land the distillery actively manages towards biodiversity. The long-term vision is to be the most nature-positive drinks business in the world. None of that is consumer-facing in the moment of purchase.
Yet all of it is structurally true, and it gives the product a rootedness that no marketing budget can manufacture.
From Australia, the grape-infused gin expressions coming out of wine regions are doing something similar. The use of local grape varieties, particularly shiraz, pinot and grenache, connects gin to place in a way that makes geographic sense. Four Pillars pioneered this. Others have followed.
The flavour comes from the land, not from a flavouring house.
From Latin America, several Chilean and Argentinean distilleries have been building with maqui berries for several years. There’s Ma’Hai Maqui Berry Gin, made with 14 botanicals including calafate and maqui berries, while Last Hope Dry Gin also use them too. Top of the must try list for those seeking out a full dose of flavour is Tepaluma Maqui Gin, which is produced along the Carretera Austral in Patagonia.
If you haven’t come across it – the maqui berry is indigenous to the region. Nowhere else could you find producers who make these gins. That geographical lock is the most defensible position any flavoured or contemporary gin producer can occupy.
And when I asked her about it, Tepaluma Co-founder Andrea Zavala Peña explained why: “For us, the future of flavour is less about intensity or weirdness, it’s about emotion and connection. What draws you into the story of the flavour and leaves a lasting impression on the human experience.”
This same pattern happens wherever you care to look and wherever you care to find a great gin maker.
From Canada, Black Fox Farm and Distillery’s Haskap Gin uses the haskap berry, a small, intensely flavoured fruit native to northern Canada that has no real equivalent elsewhere. The gin is inseparable from its geography in the same way.
From Singapore, Brass Lion Distillery’s Pearl Jasmine Gin connects to the island’s floral and cultural landscape in a way that is distinctly local. Jasmine is not a botanical you commonly find in European gin. In that context, it is not exotic. It is home.
That is where flavoured gin is at its most defensible and compelling. When the flavour is the place. When the product cannot be made anywhere else.
Provenance provides specificity as well as cultural authenticity. And when producers nail that they are able to produce gins that, by default, can never be generic. That is the point.
Fun is not a lesser ambition
Something Tom Warner said to me during our conversation is worth others hearing. His singular reason for being, as he puts it now, is this: “We come into your lives at moments of joy. What we want to deliver is that in the palm of your hand, you have the tastiest and most exciting thing in the world. That’s it. Everything else is secondary.”
Flavoured gin brought that idea into the mainstream of the category. It helped democratise gin. It gave people who had never been interested an entry point. And at its best it’s all the cerebral, authentic things I’ve mentioned – but it’s also fun. Perhaps, more importantly, about having fun.
That contribution should not be quietly erased by the embarrassment some in the industry feel about the category’s excesses.
I’ve been openly critical about how a great deal of what was produced was not good. Yes, the market was flooded. Yes, the novelty model created promiscuous consumers with no brand loyalty and no lasting relationship with any particular producer.
Those are real failures and they contributed to a real contraction.
But the category also produced dozens of other expressions made by people who genuinely cared about what they were putting in the glass. Who cared about uplifting drinkers in moments of delight and escapism. Those products exist. The people who made them are still working.
Where is it headed?
My honest view is that flavoured gin as a distinct label will become largely invisible in the next five years. Contemporary gin will absorb the best of what flavoured gin became, and the worst of what it was will have already left the market.
There will be more complexity in gin overall. More attention to how and why something is made. A renewed focus on the serve. More connection to place.
The gins that earn their place don’t need a sub-category to survive. Or a label. Besides, they are already finding their shape.
They taste like maqui berries on the edge of Patagonia. Like rhubarb grown on a farm in Harrington. Like a margarita that is better than any margarita you have made before.
Gin is supposed to be joyful first and underpinned by a meaningful connection. Flavoured gin, at its best, was always an honest expression of that idea.
The era of novelty, the era of flavour as a gimmick — that chapter is closing. What comes next is more interesting and it’s far beyond Pink.
Written by Olivier Ward, March 2026.
